Cedar Mill Falls
This is Cedar Mill Falls in Beaverton, Oregon.
This is Cedar Mill Falls in Beaverton, Oregon. It’s a nice little waterfall, uniquely located in a developed neighborhood. If you look only at the waterfall, it’s easy to ignore the traffic nearby. Just look around though, and you’ll see the busy street just a few dozen feet away up the stairs.
The boardwalk and viewing platform were built by the developer Polygon Northwest, a great example of promoting local beauty by giving people better access. Given all the other waterfalls in the region, it would be easy to miss this modest one. However, I love the incongruous combination of beauty and location, and visit it whenever in the area.
Photography Notes
The water was very low in this particular picture, because it was taken in the fall. I may be back in the spring, and hope to check it out again. As it is, the picture doesn’t do the waterfall justice. Even at this low flow, it was very pretty.
This picture was a single exposure, with a picture taken looking down and combined with the others to complete the sphere.
Spiritual Notes
I think this picture is a good example of the way VR photography can teach us to look beyond standard perspectives. There is more to this world than our natural senses reveal, even when aided by technology, and choosing to focus only on the natural viewpoint leads to a sort of deliberate blindness. Deliberate, because we choose whether or not to look around. Looking around is not natural; the easiest choice is to believe that what we see is all there is, but that’s like believing that love is only about biochemistry. There’s much, much more and in fact, the unseen may be the most important. In a world increasingly dominated by mechanistic principles, we need to remember, explore, and even celebrate, the rest of reality.