This winter I found a waterfall. Obviously, it was under snow and ice at the time, but I promised myself to get there at first best opportunity in the spring and today was it. In the winter you get there following the snow mobile trail, but in the summer there are two roads that take you close and leave about 1 km to do on foot. My choice of roads was perhaps not the best possible today, there was a point the road was so bad I considered turning back, but then I thought, nothing ventured nothing gained… so my car gained a few new scratches after a couple of ground hits. My next car will have higher clearance!

Besides the obligatory photography equipment, I had also packed a gimmick and a pair of sturdy rubber gloves. I knew that there would be a lot of wood debris lining the waterfall but because it’s such a small brook, it would be easy to clear out the small stuff. And sure enough, it was – I got it looking quite nice, apart from the trees that had fallen across the brook. If you look at the first picture, you can see some of that stuff in the lower left corner and on the right but it looked a whole lot worse at first, many of those small waterfalls were broken by small branches and dead leaves. In the second picture, you see the fallen trees but this is not even the worst spot, one section of the falls were almost completely blocked out of view by a fallen spruce.

This waterfall is such a nice little treasure, I will come here in the summer for sure when everything is growing, for example I saw some ferns coming up and what could be a nicer decoration than ferns? The height of the fall is also impressive, of course it’s not continuous at all but I reckon overall it must be the highest one in Loos.

The gimmick that I had packed was my blue/yellow polariser. It’s been ages since I’ve used it, and to be honest, any gimmick filter is best used with care and seldom. The last time I used it was in the winter a few years ago so using it now in the spring and in the forest was new for me. It was a useful experience because I discovered that the polariser works magic on the bland looking mosses. Just compare the first picture with the third one, there’s a world of difference in the moss. The white balance in both pictures is set by picking a custom balance from the white water. So I was thinking, in the future, I could take one picture with a normal polariser for the water, and a second one with the b/y polariser for the forest and then combine them to get rich green mosses and natural looking water.

Other than that, the gimmicky nature of the b/y polariser is obvious. The way it paints the rocks golden can be nice (to a limit) but the blue version looks awful. Maybe the blue end of the polariser will be useful under some circumstances that I can’t think of right now, but I’m already looking ahead to the autumn because it feels like the golden effect would be perfect then!