When the clear water of the Cold River tumbles through channels of granite, its ripples bend any strong sunlight before it strikes the channel’s floor, creating a second plane looking like cells of tissue, their size depending on the angle of light, their colors varying with the stone and what is growing on it.
A detail of 1 showing the “cell structure.”
Varying the theme.
… then varying the theme again.
… and finding or making more variations on it, depending on the rock, the flow, and what patches of foam chanced by and what shadows they cast.
This image, compressed electronically enough to fit on this website, cannot convey the details of the complete file or large print, in which the moving, sparkling water is rendered as fine threads of white.
Different light, time of day and tone, but both the surface and rock riverbed are retained.
Even when the light on the surface is almost blinding, the bed remains visible, although it, too, is rendered in yet different tones.
This photograph let me recognize how much I had admired many of Eliot Porter’s works and learned from them.
This photograph links with the others through tones and theme but treats the third dimension unlike any of the others.
Both surface and riverbed are visible yet again, both varying, the dominant hues and mood different overall from those in the other images.
This patch of water and stone lies right near the one presented in photograph 11 but appears different due to different light. The impression of relative flatness resulted from using a tilt/shift lens. With the lens raised to its limit, the camera looked out over the river although it was almost horizontal.
Just a few sparkles reveal the water flitting across this rock in places.
Taking 13 even further, this photograph brings out the rock’s textures and hues even more.
Not all the water on the rock was moving when the camera saw it, so the scene yielded images also of quiet.
And in fact, the water is placid above the dam and falls, though the rock is recognizably the same granite.
Every quiet pool in the hollows in the rock differed from the next in shape and hues.
A return to the theme of clear, cold water flowing over rock, this time at a distance and in light that make them together appear unlike the sunlit hollows.
A large bubble ventured out over the deeper channel, blocking as well as bending the strong light.
