I ‘discovered’ the beauty of this wonderful dam spillway a few years ago and wrote a blog about it. Since then, it has been in the back of my mind to do a return trip when the situation was correct. Well Hurrican Irene seemed like the right time for the return…
I really wanted to see how this twin waterfall was going to handle Mother Natures wrath. The lake above is rapidly filling with mountain stream runoff from Hurricane Irene’s six hours of rain and at this stage of the day the lake is about two feet higher than normal. The only outlet to relieve the pressure is this dam spillway. So here I am. There is some shelter from the pouring rain from the trees leaves but I was getting soaked, and the noise from the rushing water is deafening…..what a mini-adventure !!
I brought both my D3 and D3s, I had the 70-200 on the the D3s and the wide angle 24-70mm on the D3. Both cameras are essentially the same, the only real difference is that the D3s can shoot in real low light. I knew that wasn’t going to be a consideration because I wasn’t going to be able to get the effect I was looking for at a high shutter speed speed.
With my D3s and the 70-200 my field of view was to narrow for my liking, I just seemed to close to the subject. A close up of a rock at 70mm getting hammered with water does not really tell the story. So after a while, I put the D3S down and picked up my D3 with the 24-70, and began to frame in at 35mm. This was more like it. The rain made things more difficut to see thru the viewfinder and soon, I was just on autopilot, setting my ISO, aperature and shutter to what I wanted, sort of preconceiving at point of capture what the Image would look like, I also ended up setting the white balance to cloudy, which made the lake water browns and ambers pop against the white frothy run off.
I moved to various spots on the river bank, selecting elements to frame and shoot, however this location and Image was the keeper for the day. In photoshop, I was able to get the amber color using a great plugin that goes unnoticed, Tiffen Dfx, as well as a NIK Complete effect called color contrast which provided the luminance of the water….
It is disturbing to hear and read about all the water damage that this region thru the Berkshires and Vermont took on due to the Hurricane. A lot of those areas are my stomping grounds for Image taking and I’ve seen first hand the power of this rain and I hope things get back to normal for everyone as soon as possible…..
