Fall water, fall

OK, dumb title but the story behind the shot is dumb too so they fit together.

On the way out of the Bear River’s tiny canyon, my guide was challenged to take a shot of this flowing water in the full sunlight using the Nikon D60. She fought with it for about 10 minutes but was too mentally ‘used up’ from the previous 20 or 30 challenges I gave her to get it right. (Is that too many challenges for a beginner? I used to have tests in school with more than 30 questions so how can anything as uncomplicated as using a DSLR on a river for the first time in bright sunlight be that tough? Geeeeee!!!!!!) Just to prove my extremely advanced skills, I said I could do it in less than 60 seconds. This was one of those shots.

When I got to her computer, I used Corel PaintShop Pro XI to try to salvage at least one of those miserable shots I boasted about. This was the best I could do and the use of semi-opaque cloning to attempt covering all the blown out spots was rather extensive but she didn’t see me doing it so ‘it never happened’, right?

I had refused to shoot this location the first time we went here because it’s completely artificial. The water falls this evenly because of a disgustingly ugly bottom portion of an old concrete watergate. I don’t know WHAT PG&E was thinking way back whenever they constructed that scar on the river but I wasn’t going to catch it with MY camera and MY time. But for bragging rights, I aimed high, shot low, and cropped the living daylights out of the shot to try and hide the bitter truth.

Alrighty then, let’s just keep this little secret between us, okie-dokey?