Tag: McCormick’s Creek

The permanent process of erosion is best visible in winter when it is suspended. The natural pull of gravity seems powerless against the tight grip of the frost.

Because the trees and rocks had somehow to get there, we can be certain that warmer weather will set things dramatically in motion again.

Today’s pictures were taken all at the same spot, where McCormick Creek bends slightly and the canyon is deepest. All this is a relic from the last ice age.

At the moment it looks like it is in a state of eternal permanence.

We clearly understand little about time.

A year after I returned to serious photography, in 2009, I came across this archaic ritual:

Whenever I visited McCormick Creek State Park subsequently, I stopped here for a few minutes.

Visiting this place became a ritual by itself.

The winter of 2009/2010 was violent, and the tree got a bit dislodged.

It remained like this for another year.

But in 2012, the spring flooding carried the tree away.

Whenever I passed by, I checked how this place had changed, hoping for another fallen tree to appear on the altar stone.

Last year, something unexpected emerged.

A young sycamore has grown, lodging its roots under the rock.

Let’s be patient.

As hinted at earlier, Laowa has made a 9mm full frame lens, and I couldn’t resist.

The lens is small, much smaller than the Samyang 10mm lens, which may come at a price. Its widest aperture is only 5.6, and there is a bit of distortion going on, but I can’t complain about sharpness.

I think I’ll call this lens my black hole, it sucks everything in.

No human eye is capable of a perspective like this. 

The pictures here were taken a McCormick’s Creek State park, following the creek from its over-photographed waterfall  until it merges into the White River, a tributary to the Wabash, itself flowing into the Ohio, then flowing into the Mississipi. That’s a long trip for a little water.

My trip was shorter, and a nice contrast to the loop of the Pate Hollows trail from a day ago.

When you reach the end, that’s it. The only option is to turn back.

Does one need this? A lens with extreme perspective? Or, to follow a stream until it ends?

The reason is simple, sometimes: Turning back is not that different from changing the perspective.

But learning is hard.

This morning I decided to replay the game Still Live that consists of walking around and taking pictures of things on the ground as they are. It is an exercise in acceptance.

It was a crisp morning, nobody was out there that early on the first day of the new year.

This time I made it even harder, by reducing everything to black and white, to dark and light.

Maybe this modification of the concrete into something abstract is an escape to avoid comprehension.

But by hiding the obvious, either the structural core becomes visible, or the underlying noise.

Everything depends on what we want to see.

Using a refractive filter to show in a single image what is before and behind you is a useful allegory of linear time, and the ability to split light into pretty rainbows can create the illusion that we understand its inner workings, like in the waterfall pictures above and below. There is a danger that the mere effect becomes purpose.

I found another effect more compelling, using a filter patterned with many facets, a little like an insect eye. Below, at the spring, we can see reality repeated and made visible in ghost like images.

What we see are slightly different views of the same scene, shifted against each other, resulting in a mild form of cubism, as in the quarry below.

Much of this can of course done with a single image in Photoshop. Doing it with a movable filter has the advantage that you can play with the constraints of reality while there. You take a picture of what you see, and don’t create what you want to see afterwards.

The effect can be subtle, creating the illusion of a cyclic space in which we can walk freely, refracted as well.

The recent flooding has once again changed the landscape in McCormick’s creek, removing everything from decaying leaves to trunks that have been around at least a decade.

Rocks have been cleaned and assembled nicely.

Even the obvious mud seems relieved and shows off curious patterns.

It won’t stay long like this: Spring is around the corner.

Things will grow and grow over, obscuring again what we should not see.

Some rocks will be picked up and thrown. 

No need to panic. The water will keep flowing, out of nowhere to nowhere.

Two weeks can be a long time.

After a few cold days and an ice storm, the colorful leaves are gone now and the mood changes towards winter.

What do we prefer: A temporary feast of color, or a clear view into a bleak future?

The choice is not easy,

mainly because it will stay like this now for at least four months.

My physics high school teacher’s favorite example for exponential decay was not the textbook one, but rather the decay of foam bubbles in a glass of beer.

These were good times. Chernobyl was still many years away, and one could happily replace cold war fears of a global nuclear disaster by that of an indecent amount of foam in a beer.

Not so anymore. Dangerous alcohol has been replaced by even more dangerous drugs, and the surprisingly capable and reasonable politicians by maniacs. Why? How?

This year I am teaching probability, and have replaced some of the rather morbid text book exercises by ones containing bubble baths, to protect my students from being traumatized by reality. What is the half-life of moral standards?

The large amount of foam on our pristine creeks are called surfactants, and can have natural or human causes.

Making that distinction is quite telling.