My intent was to take a picture of the path without anyone on it; but as I was focusing, some people walked around me and continued on down. I was going to wait, then I thought I would include them for scale! Also my mom is always telling me I should put more people in my pictures.

The river’s level at this point is beginning the steep drop toward the falls. The power of the water was impossible to capture in a still photo, but I took several anyway — I don’t have much reference of rivers in my collection, and here I particularly wanted the way it breaks over the rocks and flows around them. There’s also a section in the foreground of underwater rocks, which I always find difficult to visualize, so it’s nice to have some reference.

This is partly natural rocks and man-made concrete; it’s a fish ladder built to help the salmon past the falls so that more of them will make it to the spawning ground. I am dubious about the value of this to the survival of the species, since only the very strongest would make it otherwise, but there were salmon still spurning the easy way and leaping the falls. I thought this made a striking composition with the contrast between straight and organic lines.

The vines cascading down the cliff opposite me drew my eye; when I looked at the photo later I realized why: all the lines converged in just the right way. The rocks and even the other vegetation seems to be pointing at those trailing tendrils!

These mossy ledges seem to be the perfect spot to spy a fairy or an enchanted frog. Definitely a photo for my “magical settings” folder!

My friend Tania said that this looked like a sleeping giant; the upright one is his face, and the one extending forward is his hand. I’m going to try something new and Photoshop some features into this photo (fodder for a later blog)!

The colour of the water downstream from the falls was a beautiful blue-green that contrasted nicely with the autumn leaves. I took a lot of pictures and had trouble picking just one!

This is a true rainforest; there is moss everywhere — so many different kinds, mixed with lichens, all over everything. I love painting moss in watercolours, and usually do layers of colours printed with a fine sponge to get the soft, fuzzy texture.

These mossy rocks also lured me into taking a lot of pictures. I picked two that I liked, this one with the horizontal format and the next one in a vertical format. Both have strong diagonals and the bold graphic element of the trees; both would make interesting subjects for paintings just as they are with some minor adjustments of compositional details. For this one in particular, I’d probably crop the top a bit to emphasize the river, and possibly rearrange the spacing of the trees to make the rhythm more irregular.

There’s an Arrogant Worms song that talks about how Canada has lots of trees and rocks, and rocks and trees. And water. I kept humming the chorus the whole time. If you haven’t heard the song, treat yourself right now and give it a listen. Then come back and look at the rest of my pictures!

Something about the arrangement of the little tree growing from the rocks above the falls appealed to me. I took a bunch of pictures on the way down the trail, but coming back, the light had changed and brought the colours out more.

Don’t forget to look up when you’re hunting painting reference — and new desktop photos for your computer!

… and don’t forget to look down, too, and do some closeups! These are liquorice ferns, which can be found growing out of the sides of rocks and trees and trees and rocks…

The delicacy of this moss-and-lichen-covered bush appealed to me. I don’t know that I would ever paint it as a composition in itself, but it would make a nice addition to a forest scene in, say, a comics rendition of Elfland!

I caught a salmon! On camera of course. This is as close as my zoom would get me. It was tricky waiting for the salmon to leap and catch it before it fell back in. I have no idea how these creatures manage to get up the falls, but they do, every year, to spawn and then die of exhaustion. I was awestruck at the sheer tenacity of these fish.

Here’s the view looking back upstream above the falls where the salmon were jumping. I always try to take several pictures of an area that I am interested in, for context, in case I later want to do a painting and need to know what was around the thing that caught my interest in the first place.

The quiet waters downstream presented a chance for some dramatic contrast. The autumn colours on the right bank glow! There is some nice eye-leading stuff happening here that would take very little tinkering to make a nice painting. The upper and the lower sections of bright water point at the colourful foliage. For a painting, I might crop a little bit off of the left and add a bit to the right (I’ve got other photos for context), and make the tree on the edge of the cliff slant a bit more. Or not.