When I resumed doing photography a few years ago, this creek was one of my inspirations. I had been weak for a few years, for various reasons, and when I regained some strength I would carry my camera and lenses on short trails to try to find something interesting to photograph. Thinking about art kept me from thinking about exhaustion and soreness. It worked pretty well.
I have been looking at some shots I took over the last few years, looking for anything that might benefit from what I know now compared to what I knew when.
There were half a dozen photographs taken from approximately the same spot, each of them with problems - bad focus, severe tilt, over- and under-exposed—you name it. But three of them, in particular, had bad focus in a useful way: one focused on the far side of the river, another on the middle log, and another on the nearest log. I did a focus stack in Affinity Pro, and it selected just the focused section of each shot and tried to combine them into a coherent photo.
It was pretty awful, actually, and I was going to dismiss it but decided to see if I could manually remove and re-align myself. Needless to say, it went well, it wasn’t nearly as difficult as I’d imagined, and the result is above. Here’s a portion of the mess: multiple blades of grass, widely separated duplicate shorelines, echoes of rocks and other details:
You may have noticed that the water flowing from back to front is pretty clear: very blue with reflected sky. It is clear, but it was also stained with tannins from upstream trees; if you look carefully, you will see that sections of the water in shade have a deep brown tint to them.
The White river was running hard with spring rains; it flows down from the vicinity of Mt. Rainier and so it carries rain, snow melt, glacial till (soil), mud from former floods, and looks pretty dang muddy as a result. How someone got “white river” from that I don’t know. :)
Taken with the Sony A7r IV and the 50mm f/1.2 lens. That wide-open aperture is why I ran into so many focus problems. I was trying to see what I could do with such a fast lens and its limited zone of focus. I should have wised up and shot with the right settings, maybe f/11 would have worked OK. But the focus stack was a fine save, very happy with the resulting image. It has really good and rich color, sharp details, and if there are any seams from the combine, they are not too obvious. :)
This image is a dandy and the larger I make it on my iPad the better it looks. The poet may say that the water is the color of what it carries and that of course is true. for example glacial polish turns water a rather milky turquoise - distinct color that this painter loves. In your picture the calm foreground water reflects the sky. It also is connected to how fast the water is moving and over the rocks. That creates the white water effect. Great job of integrating all these different elements and so many more that I don’t know much about. I really enjoyed this.