Blaen y Glyn waterfalls walk

I wanted to work at two distances. From the drone, the valley organises itself into corridors: the river channels channelling between woodland and moorland, the rust-coloured winter grass marking the open ground, bare trees making a grey lace above the watercourse. A single fall visible from above is a thin white line dropping through the canopy into a dark gorge — the sound of it inaudible at drone height, the scale of it only apparent because of the trees beside it.

From ground level, the dolerite is black and slick. The rock absorbs the light and gives nothing back; the water moving over it provides all the brightness in the frame. White spray against near-black stone. Cascades tumbling in multiple tiers, the mist from each drop hanging in the cold January air and finding the moss below it, which is already saturated and vivid green.

The close shot of the rock itself shows what the moss is doing: working into every fissure and crevice in the dolerite, the growth following the geology exactly. Lichen and moss covering stone and fallen timber in the forest shade. The dolerite surface is not smooth — it fractures in columns, each column a different shade of dark, the moss deciding which edges to colonise and which to leave exposed.

A tall waterfall plunging into a pool, the pool ringed with bare woodland. White vertical line. Dark everything else. Two scales of the same physics: the macro view from the drone showing the valley's structure, the close shot showing the individual stone.