The water's at its best for photographing when there's lots of it. This time of year is better for rebuilding the dams. That doesn't mean snapping stops.
No. 2 dam had to be moved - it was undermining the tree roots to too great a degree. I wanted to try something which would give more horizontal momentum to the water, building a narrow, but relatively deep, channel in before the fall. That way, it might be possible to push the water over several edges, moving forward. I didn't think I'd be able to see if it worked properly until we got good rain (which still hasn't happened.) Conveniently, the water company chose that afternoon to let some water out of the reservoir at the head of the valley. The horizontal momentum thing seems to work.
Elsewhere, I've been filming clouds on a Flip HD and speeding the videos up, to try and show the dimensionality of clouds. Here, the time-lapse is going in the other direction, taking a frame from a Nikon D3 every 30 seconds.
The look of the water, once it starts moving, is achieved by using my favoured shutter speed for this kind of water. Even though the exposures are 30 seconds apart, the flow still shows. I'm not keen on that milky look, favoured by camera clubs the world over. It's quite pretty, but it doesn't look like water.
The changing direction and quality of the light gives away the fact that the video spans two sessions, before and after the England-Germany World Cup game (remember? 1 - 4). It was a comforting place to be in after that uncomfortable encounter. I've left all the frames in, something I want to look at further, using time-lapse. I suspect that there's another form of verity video in there somewhere. I've left the white balance and aperture on auto, but, again, I'm going to play with that a little more.
(It's HD, so full-screen's good...)
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