Green falls
- 📍 Location: Cascade des Tufs, Les Planches-près-Arbois, Jura, France
- 📅 Date: 2023
The tufa wall is entirely upholstered in moss and the spring runs out through all of it, so the falls arrive in a dozen separate threads and land in a pool the colour of bottle glass. I framed from downstream, level with the water, to keep that pool in the picture.
The greens are doing all the structural work. Dark moss on the rock, brighter growth on the ledges, a paler green in the pool itself — three values of one colour, and the white of the water is the only thing that breaks them. I resisted any temptation to warm the image up.
A few seconds of exposure smooths the pool to a plane and turns the threads into a soft vertical grain. The shelves of tufa keep their edges, so the picture has one soft element and one hard one, and neither takes over.
The Jura in early summer is wet, quiet and largely empty, and a place like this is a room made of water. I sat on the bank for a long while before setting up. Some locations demand to be worked; this one only asks to be sat with until you know where to stand.
Limited-edition fine-art print from the Skywaven Studios collection, available in several sizes, papers and framing options.
