The city of Ithaca, New York, boasts having over a hundred waterfalls and gorges within ten miles. The web led me to one of the more noted, Ithaca Falls. It’s just outside the campus of Cornell University, in a place you are not likely to find without GPS. It’s a short walk along the stream from the unmarked parking area to the foot of the falls.

My goal for photographing such sights is to answer the question: “What was it like?” To start with, it was cold. Beyond that, the falls were beautiful, the stream from the falls was in a gorge, and there were a few tourists enjoying the scenery. This photo shows some of the problems in conveying the sense of the place:

I think it looks cold enough, but there not much clue to the scale of the Falls. Are they fifteen feet high or a hundred feet high? Moreover, there is a distracting thing (its a bridge) above the Falls. The cure is to reposition the viewpoint and wait for some tourists to provide the scale.

Ithaca Falls. Larger version here

The image is a spliced panorama from two frames taken with a pocket camera, a Canon A570S. The frame with the people was taken first, because I had to wait until they moved into a suitable arrangement. The second image was framed to be left of the falls to keep motion out of the splice region. I lightened the shadows and darkened the highlights a little, but it’s a fairly straight shot.

That’s as good as I could do for a single photo, but it’s nice to have a group of photos to show the site. The stream below the Falls shows reflection from the walls of the gorge. Another two-image spliced panorama shows it.

Ithaca Falls. Larger version here

I couldn’t get far enough away from the near wall of the gorge to show its height with one shot. I made a panorama from three image stacked vertically instead. The camera was held horizontally to keep the image from being extremely skinny. The top frame had a lot of sky, which reduced the exposure automatically for that frame. If one exposure were used for the whole image the sky would have been rendered white as the camera adjusted for an average with the dark wall.

Walking back to the road there was a nice scene with a building atop the gorge wall. In this case the people are providing a depth cue more than a scale cue. They help give the sense that the building is far away.

I wonder if the cropping might be improved with this picture. Perhaps getting rid of some of the top edge and right edge would help focus attention on the main features. I decided it better represented the place as it is, but I’m not sure. It also occurred to me that a special effects filter might work well with this image, perhaps a painting effect or a woodcut effect. Maybe so, but nothing I tried seemed an improvement.

If my pictures give you a sense of what it was like to be there, then my goal was achieved.