This is one of those long, narrow waterfalls that has formed a crater in the middle of its drop. I used a 432mm telephoto lens to zoom in on that crater from across the valley. (You can see the entire waterfall in my Landscape Gallery by clicking on the thumbnail at the bottom.

Later, when looking at the color version of this image, I noticed that there really was not much color showing in my closeup picture at all. The backdrop for the water was in deep shadow. Only a few green trees barely showed in the picture. When I converted it to this black and white version, I honed the image down its very essence – the force of the water, as it flowed into the crater and the out of it again. The black and white version intensifies the crater's effect on the water's movement, and made this photograph much more expressive than it had been in color. (The color version of the entire waterfall, appearing in my landscape gallery, is a wideangle image embracing the view from across the valley. It works because of the way the light falls on the green’s, yellow’s and gold’s in the brilliantly colored foliage that embrace that scene and because of the foreground trees I added to that image.)

When I made my black and white conversion, I enriched the simplifying effect of the black shadows surrounding the falls by removing whatever traces of foliage lurked within them, and substantially abstracting the scene. I also increased the contrast and detail in the water as it smashed into and then flowed out of the crater, by playing with the different “channels” in the “channel mixer” selection box within Photoshop’s “Layers” palette.

This black and white image goes well beyond a travel photograph. Because it is now an abstraction, it becomes art-oriented image as well. It goes well beyond describing the appearance of Tad Fane Falls itself. It becomes a symbolic rendering of nature’s power, a much more universal statement. It is also becomes more mysterious in black and white – when coming upon this image, we might at first wonder exactly just what we are looking at. It almost resembles a fanciful X-ray picture made deep inside the human body. But it’s not – we are looking at my own impression of the massive authority of nature itself. It is up to the imagination of the viewer where it may go from there.