Monarch Wilderness

― Henry James.

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One of the challenges that I have faced as a landscape photographer is with conveying an experience. With the amount of time I have spent behind a lens, I can say with a reasonable amount of confidence that I could take an excellent technical shot at almost any location. But it's far more challenging to convey what emotions a landscape stirred up correctly. Let me give you an example. All my life, I have been a fan of waterfalls, and one of the first techniques that I mastered as a photographer was to capture a silky-smooth and ethereal beauty of a cascading waterfall. But not all waterfalls are beautiful, some of them are just fun, and I have always struggled with conveying the fun element through my photos.

With that in mind, let's talk about the subject of today's post, Grizzly falls, a waterfall only a few steps away from the main park road that snakes alongside the Kings River at Kings Canyon National Park. The problem I had with this waterfall was the angle at which it twists, making it hard to make the falls beautiful in a picture as the foreground interest twist away from the main waterfall, making the classical waterfall shot almost impossible. But the three times I have visited the Park, I didn't stop at grizzly falls to admire the beauty of it but for the fact that it was a fun location. It's great to feel the mist from the fall on your face on a hot, dry summer day. So, after giving up on the classic waterfall shot, I tried to take a more lighthearted attempt. I use my iPhone X instead of my regular DSLR and tried an angle that emphasized the way the water was jetting out from the cliff. In turned out to be my favorite shot of this fun little waterfall.