One thing I miss is the presence of old mills on creeks and rivers. New England is fairly littered with them and I loved to find and photograph them. This was taken in Hampstead, NH on a brook that had three of them within a mile or so on the same waterway. Most of them were tub mills and ground things like potatoes for starch. The bigger ones with sluice ways or ponds turned wheels for lumber or flour. I don’t know what this one was for, but it had two large walls on either side of the stream. I stood on one with the tripod in the tallest position to take a picture of the other. I love the juxtaposition of the ruins being reclaimed by the land and the water still a force to be reckoned with. Not sure if this entirely fits the category, but it’s a favorite, if slightly weird, image in my collection.
Specific Feedback Requested
Is it too odd? I don’t have much more near wall to include because if I angled down more I couldn’t have included all of the far wall. Choices choices!
Technical Details
Is this a composite: No
All Lightroom processed for a 2:3 crop and some lens correction. General exposure and tonal improvements and maybe some white balance adjustment.
Hi Kris, very cool image. I especially like the trees interacting with the wall. Like nature reclaiming. White balance looks spot on, and the whites in the river are perfect. Overall, it feels warm and relaxing. I don’t think the near wall is intruding, but also if you removed it you would lose a bit of the water. It works well as is.
Cool - I love old rock walls. The contrast between the energetic water and the solid wall is lovely. It feels like it would have been better to include more of the bottom land, but I can see that wasn’t possible. Perhaps dodging the LRC to bring the brightness up to match the LLC would give more balance.
Thanks much @David_Bostock & @Bonnie_Lampley - at this point in my digital photography learning curve, I was just getting to the point where I felt some mastery over the longer exposure. I find one of the more difficult things is to visualize how water will look when it’s slowed down like this. Our eyes and brains are constantly processing instant motion if you know what I mean. So composing this was a challenge for me.
Now I’ve been thinking about it, probably the mills on this brook were built and used at different times. There is a larger one upstream from this with much higher walls and a dam that made mill pond. I’ll see if I can dredge up a decent image of it.
This is quite a cool image. It feels very relatable as I can imagine myself walking the trail/path along this creek. The only nit that I have in this image is the reddish rock in the stream. I would consider cooling the color temperature because it pulls my eyes from the wall.
