One area where I nearly always sense the world beyond the physical is sitting quietly with flowing water. Maybe it is the mutability of water that moves me away from the physical. I am not sure, but I know this is true:
“If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.” Nikola Tesla
Then my brain gets in the way and asks “why?”. It is the same with the practice of photography. How to get the brain out of the way.
Pedernales Falls State Park, Texas
Small, subtle edit improvements can make such a difference. This image was posted before but I learned something new in Lightroom and voila. Makes you wonder if we are more of a graphic artist or photographer?
Where the river ends, the sun glints, until the dark of night rules the river.
There are stretches of the river bed as bald as possible of nothing but flat stone and then you find a congregation of rocks clinging together under the water.
The refraction of light in the Pedernales river plus the convex/concave moving waves of water around rock create dancing “light waves” on the rock bed of the river. There is a scientific and objective understanding of this phenomenon but there is also a understanding of beauty and connection too.
“You will always find an answer in the sound of water.” Chuang-Tse
Yesterday morning was spent hiking around my favorite Texas nature spot: Pedernales Falls State Park. I went there with questions both practical and philosophical. I walked away with answers. And the only counsel there was the rock and the water and the sound they make together.
A moment to our cameras is usually measured in fractions of second. Often the faster the better. 1/500th of second is certainly better than 1/16th of second to capture the moment, correct? Maybe not. The way we experience moments is certainly not that fast. A waterfall is sensed as whole rather than a frozen snapshot. The water is seen as a falling mass rather than a thousand drops as a 1,2500th of second would show; the spray tickles or skin, wet invades our nose, and then there is the roar water mass makes as it collides in upon itself. Further downstream a leaf slowly floats by. How to capture this in a still image is the challenge. Somewhere in the dimension of time and light is the answer.
“Whatever else a photograph may be about, it is always about time.” – Richard Misrach
Shot with a Lee Seven5 filter system on the OM-D E-M5.
In my previous post I quoted Lewis Fry Richardson’s poem regarding atmospheric turbulence. Richardson was a mathematician and meteorologist who pioneered modern mathematical techniques of weather forecasting in the 1920’s. He saw that behind the mechanics of the planet’s weather there was mathematical models via differential equations. We still use this method today for weather forecasting.
When I look at images such as these swirls in the river’s current I can certainly see mathematics but there is so much more there as well. We usually only see this world’s surface. But when we sit still enough and move deeper into nature then we know there is so much more behind this curtain. It seems to be like an onion with many layers. I view the mathematics layer actually close to the surface. It gets fuzzier and more poetic the deeper you can peel it.
DJS PhotoBlog 
