Fall leaves
- 📍 Location: Vaux de Cernay, Yvelines, France
- 📅 Date: 2023
The stream drops through a staircase of small rock shelves here, and after a wet October it was running hard enough to fill every one of them. I framed from just above the water, close to a flat wet boulder where two orange maple leaves had come to rest.
Those two leaves are the subject. Everything else — the white rush behind them, the mossy banks, the trees closing overhead — is context arranged to make them matter. Photographing a stream without a fixed point gives you energy and no meaning.
A one-second exposure was the right compromise: long enough to make the water continuous and soft, short enough that it still has direction and does not turn into fog. I made several and kept the one where the current still reads as moving from left to right.
It rained the whole time, which is why the rock is dark and saturated and why the colours hold instead of glaring. I came home soaked and with one frame I wanted, and that ratio is entirely normal for this kind of work.
Limited-edition fine-art print from the Skywaven Studios collection, available in several sizes, papers and framing options.
