Middle Falls Abstract

It's that time of year again where I am not doing a lot of shooting so I am going through some old photos and looking for things I wanted to post back when I shot them, but for whatever reason never got around to posting.  Here is one such photo from September 2008 that I made on an early morning hike along the Pigeon River in Grand Portage State Park.  I started out well before sunrise so I could make it to Middle Falls in time to photograph the first light on the falls.  

I got there with time to spare.  In fact, I had to wait for the sun to come up high enough to start hitting the waterfall.  As I was waiting the sun was starting to light up the opposite shoreline of the river and when it did, the reflections on the water really started to jump out at me.  I attached my 100-400mm lens and zoomed in on different areas of the water, taking advantage of this magical light.  

The colors that you see in the water here are reflected blue from the early morning sky and colors from the trees that are in full sunlight on the opposite bank of the river.  The area of the water that I was zoomed in on was still in the shade, but was reflecting the light from everywhere else around me.  I did get some nice wide-angle shots of Middle Falls on that day, but my favorite shots of the morning were these beautiful abstracts out in the middle of the river.  Once the sun was up high enough and the entire river was in full sunlight, the beautiful lighting that you see here was gone, at least until the next morning.