The River

The riverbed in winter isn’t the most photogenic landscape spot around, but I needed a place for my traditional Sunday afternoon hike. It is free to go to Tejas park and park the car, and there is all the hiking you could want, and there aren’t usually too many people there. On this Sunday most people would be home anyway and since I don’t care for football I took advantage.

I walked up and down the river, stopping here and there to see what I thought about a photo. I shot a bunch with my phone, looked at the result, shook my head, and moved on. I did finally stop to look at a reflection and considered that for a while. I thought that the bare branches and trees on the cliff might look OK reflected in the water and maybe the grass along the river would make a tolerable foreground. I set it up for a long exposure with a filter and shot a few. Below is my best result.

I cropped out some junk to the right and made it a 3:4 aspect ratio instead of the 4:6 that comes out of the camera. I went up and down trying to figure out how to shoot the grass versus the reflection, and this is what I think worked best. The cliffs and trees reflected, and that’s nice, but overall it isn’t that lovely of a scene.

Farther up the river as the sun was getting low, I saw that the rocky bank on the far side was turning from gray to yellow. I thought it looked quite nice against the blue sky with the two opposing colors. The water was quite calm as well resulting in good reflection. And you can see the near-full moon in the sky. What you don’t see is a woman that I erased.

I like the above picture, but I kind of thought it needed the river rock in the foreground so I recomposed to add it. The great difficulty was keeping my shadow out of the photo as the sun was directly behind my right shoulder and my shadow was getting very long.

I kind of like the one with the rocks in the foreground. More of a warm-cool-warm-cool color flow. What do you think?

I figured that I’d turn around and await sunset and see what it gave me looking up the river. There were no clouds, but I thought that the sky fading from orange to blue with the trees silhouetted against it would look nice. And I wanted to shoot the narrow part of the river with the rushing water as well.

I was standing in the shallow water and my tripod is as high as it will go to get more sky reflected in the water. I have shot sunset from here before, standing on the rock in the midground, but was trying a new perspective this time. I waited out the sky as long as I felt like it, decided that it wasn’t getting any better and headed home. I had to hop across the narrow point in the river you see above on a few dry places and I managed to not slip and fall.

Not the finest landscape photography you’ll ever see, but that was my Sunday afternoon river hike. Thanks for reading.

22 thoughts on “The River”

  2. All nice river shots, in my view, but the one I like best is the first one, with the 3:4 ratio. I think it’s the banded pattern of the rocky bank that gets me most. Also, it’s a bright photo, which helps lift me into a good mood.

    But I also share Jim’s concern. That poor woman. Where do people go after they’ve been erased?

    Liked by 2 people

    1. I know a lot of people love football, and I used to watch it too. Call me a die-hard grudge holder, but this all started when they moved the Oilers out of Houston.

      The Oilers said: “hey Houston, tax the heck out of your citizens and build us a cool new stadium.”
      Houston: “we haven’t yet paid off the first one we built you that you play in now.”
      Oilers: “so what? Build a new one or Nashville will.”
      Houston: “Bye.”

      The NFL, a collection of franchises that have billions in television, merch, and advertising contracts can afford to build a new stadium pretty much every year if they wanted to. The idea that cities/states have to tax people to build an expensive arena for billionaires to have their millionaire employees play a game in while charging massive amounts to those same tax-payers to attend the game and drink a beer is ridiculous. I’d rather see Houston build a new factory for some company that actually employs people.

      Houston eventually built a new baseball stadium and a new football stadium and the Astrodome sits useless. Oh well.

      Anyway, that is my rant and I why I gave up on the NFL. I have a similar rant about major league baseball.

      Like

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