Here is another image from the exact same location as my previous post, just about 50 feet downriver from the waterfall. This wasn’t even a spot I was planning on visiting – it was just a small picnic area that I happened to pull into in trying to a feel for the Chagrin area south of Cleveland. There was a light rain at the time, great conditions for creating saturated colors. As I pulled into this picnic area, I noticed a couple of kayakers getting suited up. If it is worth kayaking in the rain, I figured there MUST be something interesting here. Because of the heavy overcast skies, and it being late in the afternoon already, the light was fading fast.

After I worked the waterfall portion a little, I actually waited to see if the kayakers were planning to go over it. To my disappointment, they portaged the boats along the side when they got to the falls. While they were walking down, I setup to take some wide angle shots like this one. The riverside rocks made great foreground elements. But with not much light left, I had to be a bit picky on exactly which rock I wanted to work into a composition. With the scattering of leaves and a bit of fall color, it really communicated the time of year well. Pretty soon the kayakers were drifting along the river into the frame of the shot. One of the kayaker’s shouted to me jokingly “Hey – don’t you hate that, I am a photographer too!.” I actually wouldn’t mind getting them in the frame for an alternative shot, but the light was so darn low, they would have been red blurs. So I changed gears and started doing closeups of the leaves along the riverbed and waited for them to get far enough downriver. It was starting to get quite dark, but I had enough time to take this one last shot.

Despite the rain and not knowing my way around, I managed to find a pretty decent spot for some photography of a few different subjects. As I indicated in my previous post, rivers, waterfalls, especially with big rocks always have something worth exploration. Sometimes unexpected finds end up on your GPS!