Is moving water too difficult to describe?

[sun of sand]

A simple way of looking at water, and since it lacks truth, it is also quite shallow.

My images are more about light, and my relation to it, than descriptions of natural features. Even so, who has seen a waterfall? Or water falling from a tap? We all have (tho there is a large percentage of the population who have never seen a waterfall.) But what do we see? Does the brain process distinct images at 60/sec, or does it create a gestalt of moving water -- not the water itself? Before photography, did anyone ever paint a waterfall with the water completely stopped? Every photograph presents to us something we have never seen nor experienced.

If you photograph moving water with such a fast shutter speed that it no longer appears to be moving

?

Then you now need to describe nonmoving water
Not moving water

[sun of sand]

Vaughn, a thoughtful and engaging remark that goes "beneath the surface."

And a testament to moving water's age-old ability to inspire (and provide images for) philosophical talk about vision, consciousness, time, knowledge.

To be sure, thoughts like this sometimes skitter across my mind as I compose moving water on the GG, enriching the pleasure of LF and its contemplative ways ... that is, until it reaches the point of downright distraction!

I go beneath the surface
Why isnt what I say considered beneath the surface

oh
He said gestalt

That was enough

[sun of sand]

Lol I read your last sentence

Hope youre in relative seclusion while doing all this contemplation
Sounds near illegal

[Heroique]

As most here know, this is one of the most famous images of moving water in all of American art:



I thought I'd include it since oil paintings, I think, often enjoy an advantage over film – b/w or color – when it comes to capturing some of the most interesting aspects of moving water.

This is Frederick E. Church's "Niagra," oil on canvas, 1857 – I first came across this image in the book "American Visions" (by Robert Hughes), and it even inspired a trip to the Corcoran Gallery of Art to see it, when I was last in Washington D.C. (I especially wanted to get a close-up view of that piece of driftwood, lower left, about to take the plunge!)

Church of course was after the so-called Sublime-in-nature, a favorite theme of the 19th-C Romanticists, and I for one think this image communicates it immediately to the viewer – but only if one has the detachment necessary for suspending knowledge of the art that came later. Not just the translucent, plunging water, but the water in the sky, in the form of moving draperies of mist, and the total absence of people or tourists, have a lot to do with this effect – but there is so much about the moving water in this scene that film would have little hope of ever capturing. (Some of AA's most famous images aim for the same spiritual grandiosity, and begin to approach it.)

Nonetheless, Church's image does inspire me when I compose moving water on the GG, but mostly as an unrealizable ideal.