Spray – Cascade at the Worthington Glacier
by Lee Petersen
Week of March 23, 2026
Why This Photograph Exists
I was hiking in the Worthington Glacier area at Thompson Pass, in a narrow schist canyon with a fast-moving meltwater stream. It was a warm summer day in July, and we had to cross it a few times on wet rock in some genuinely precarious spots.
The water splaying across the flat schist in thin, accelerating sheets was unlike anything I’d seen. The tendrils of water were thread-like. Getting a usable angle on it was another problem entirely. The terrain left almost nowhere to stand, let alone set up properly.
I didn’t pack my ND filter, which I typically use to lengthen the exposure and smooth out the water. The terrain would have made use of a tripod incredibly difficult, if not impossible. My solution was to stop down to f/22, and bottom out my ISO at 100, bringing my shutter speed down to 0.2 sec (1/5), just long enough to get some motion blur.
Wedging my body against a rock to steady my hands, I fired several frames. When shooting handheld at these shutter speeds, I often find that the middle frames have the best focus, as there is always a slight shift in angle when pressing and releasing the shutter. It wasn’t how I would have chosen to shoot it, but the constraints ended up mattering less than I expected.
The conversion to black and white was an easy call. Even in color, the scene was nearly monochrome. Dark schist, white water, flat grey light due to the shadow in the narrow canyon. No sunlight was getting in here. Stripping the color out didn’t change much; it just made the decision explicit and deepened the contrast between the rock and the water.
This photograph is featured as this week’s Photo of the Week and is available as an open-edition archival print through my print lab.
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I don’t come back to this photograph because of the place or even the day. I come back to it because of the problem it presented and what I had to do to solve it. The canyon was beautiful but uncooperative. I wasn’t carrying my full kit. Just my walk-around camera and lens, no filter, no tripod, barely a place to stand. What it gave me instead was this photo, and a reminder that as long as I have a camera, I have the right amount of gear.
Photo of the Week is a weekly series featuring a single photograph and a short reflection on place and how it’s felt over time.
The photograph might be new, long archived, or something that sat unnoticed for years. It doesn’t matter when it was taken, only why it’s being revisited now.
This series is a way for me to be more intentional and think carefully about why I take photographs at all.
