Cottonwood Falls

Not long ago we met up with some friends for a weekend in Cottonwood Falls, Kansas, roughly halfway between our respective home bases in Nebraska and Oklahoma. We got a big Airbnb with plenty of room to spread out, make meals, play games, and just catch up on life while the kids hung out together. The town was small, the weather was warm, the entire experience was one that, in some ways, felt like something out of a postcard. Not long after dinner we all walked down the cobblestone-paved Main Street over to the eponymous Falls, and then continued on for a bit of geocaching. (We found one!) Before heading back to the Airbnb we all just kind of hung out on the bridge near the falls, which had long ago been transformed from a road into a pedestrian area, and after getting some shots of my family and our friends I set about seeing what I could capture of the falls themselves.

I set up my Fuji X100F on a tripod and, in an effort to smooth out the water a bit, I dialed in an exposure setting of f/16, ISO 200, and 1-second shutter. (Which, now that I think about it as I type this, I could have increased by a few seconds if I had activated my camera’s built-in ND filter. I forgot about it!) I didn’t spend too long trying to get an ideal picture here; mostly I just wanted something that would capture the scene and, hopefully, convey a sense of mood, feeling, or emotion to the viewer. The calm air, the smooth surface of the river, the aging concrete structure holding it back, and the clear sky in the background. But there’s something else going on in this picture if you look a bit closer…

Did you see it? Look on the left side of the frame, on top of the dam just near the water.

That guy is the missing piece of the photographic puzzle, the key to all of this, one might say. He provides the much-needed element of context and perspective, immediately giving viewers a sense of scale while also serving as a point of calm and serenity next to the swirling waters coming off the dam. I don’t know who he was, but until he showed up with his fishing pole the scene, while interesting, also felt a bit hollow and empty. I’m just glad he didn’t move much in the one second it took to take this picture! So to that fisherman dude: thank you, whoever you are.