you probably didn't want to do that did you?
I hiked into Marcy Dam in the Adirondacks at dusk the other night to capture the moon over the mountains and the reflection in the water (Google search images for Marcy dam to get an idea of what I was looking for). It would have been a beautiful shot except the dam had breached earlier in the summer and there was this big brown muck-heap in the middle of the pond that interfered with the middle of the reflection. I set up a shot on the wooden bridge over the dam. I used a Singh Ray soft 2 stop graduated filter to hold the sky and moon back a couple of stops. The plastic clamps on my filter holder had broken months ago so I use a clothespin to hold the filter in place. I took a b+w shot and a color transparency and think I did ok. I remove the clothespin and gravity takes over, the filter drops through the slots in the filter holder, bounces off the wood on the bridge and summersaults over the edge, followed by a little splash. I hear a quiet 'oh oh' from a camper in a group that was eating dinner on the bridge next to me, then a little louder 'you probably didn't want to do that did you?' What an understatement! It took a while but after looking in the water where I thought the filter would be I spotted the gold lettering at the top of the filter in about 3-4 feet of water. It was too cold and too late to get it that night so I hiked back in the next day at noon. Waded out in a pair of shorts, much to the amusement of an older couple who predicted correctly that the water would be pretty cold (34 degrees the night before). I waded past the location of the filter and sat on the edge of the dam to warm up. Back out to the filter resting between a rock and a submerged log, reached down, face almost in the water and after what seemed like an eternity got the filter in my fingers. I scrambled back to the dam to warm up. Then back out to dry land, congratulating myself on retrieving the filter and not falling over in the water.
If the dam had not breached the filter would have been in about 6 or 7 feet of water so I have mixed feelings about the lower water level-not so good for the picture but at least I have my filter back. It's going to be $1 million to repair the dam so it may not be fixed since it holds back water for fire fighting and there is plenty of water around. The landscape can change more rapidly than I thought. At this one spot there are slides on one of the mountains that weren't there seven years ago, the perfect reflection in the pond is gone and may never return, that 'island' in the middle will be covered with vegetation and may actually enhance future images, eventually a meadow will form and progress to forest. The landscape is dynamic and I'll have my two-stop grad filter to record what ever happens there for as long as I can walk in!
