It was late evening in the latter part of June, in the Northern Cascades of Washington. Blue sky, no breeze, fading light. My wife Joyce and I came upon this fast-moving stream after a short hike into the mountains, and I was struck by the contrast between the delicate fuchsia flowers and the energy of the water. A four-second exposure was required to capture this scene while maintaining adequate depth of field, with the result that the water appears very soft, almost like fog. Often, such a stream will move the air around it and create a slight breeze of its own, but, as luck would have it, the grasses remained motionless during the long exposure.

Photography is often a matter of compromises, juggling aperture and shutter speed according to the film speed (or ISO), lighting conditions and the characteristics of the subject, but the compromises often work out for the better. In this case, for example, some may say that the soft appearance of the water is unrealistic -- it never looks like that in "real life." But I say the softness reminds me of the sound of rushing water: shhhhhhhhhh.  And we never do see such fast-moving things perfectly clearly, as in a photograph taken at 1/1000 of a second. In any event, photography, as with other arts, is an interpretation of reality, never "reality" itself. It's about capturing and communicating an experience to others, and it should be judged by this criterion alone.