I was in Durham NC for a conference/training on a data management tool called iRODS. If you are in the Data realm, its a great tool and I recommend you try it out! But it was a 2-3 day session, and on the last day, me and my coworker were feeling a bit restless and decided to sneak out a little early.

We walked to the Sarah P Duke Garden, to check it out, and little did we know how absolutely humongous and amazing it would be. When we started walking through the park, it was slightly drizzling, we went on about our business, checking the weather. It was supposed to drizzle intermittently for a little while then be sunny for the rest of the day. As we were walking around the park, I noticed small water features, and I realized, man this would be a great opportunity to try out my new ND filter! (It wasn’t really new but I was hardly using it since I came back from my Zion trip). As I was setting up my camera, I quickly realized that I severely messed up, I had the wrong tripod mount screwed into my camera. I tried to put my camera in all different positions to stabilize it enough to gather long exposure shots of the these water features. It didn’t work out too well in my favor. I ended up giving up and just started to shoot various plants around us.

As we were finishing up, the rain picked up instead of calming down, so we followed a few people and ended up underneath a shelter. As the rain was letting up, we noticed that we were near a zen type garden. as we were walking around we noticed a waterfall, a pretty sizable one, and lucky for me, there was a stone wall surrounding the fall. I was able to set up my camera in a stable manner by balancing my camera and lense on a lense hood. I didnt think it would work..but surprisingly enough, it worked wonderfully! As soon as I was able to kind of Macgyver up a solution, with the right composition, it started to rain again! I was not about to run away and set up everything all over again, so I help my jacket and arms over my camera and waited it out, and just as the rain faded, light hit the waterfall at just the most perfect angle!