Niagara Falls, New York.

It’s about time I started telling the story of our first trip to Niagara Falls. After all, we made that visit in 2022. I’ve featured a couple of Cellpic Sundays, including one published just a couple of weeks ago on June 30, here. In that post, I shared a close view of Bridal Veil Falls in an altered reality after experimenting with AI image modification. In today’s post, I promise there is no AI alteration.

In that post, I described many details of the Cave of the Winds and how it once allowed people to view Bridal Veil Falls from behind. After the cave’s collapse, the attraction was reimagined as a close-up view. On the Maid of the Mist boat, I captured the opening photo of the American Falls as we sailed by. The smaller waterfall at the right is Bridal Veil Falls. It is separated from the more significant falls by Luna Island, now part of Niagara Falls State Park. At one point, they built an observation area at the dropoff that you can visit while on the island.

From a distance, that sizeable flat area looks like a concrete wall, but when you get close, you can see the rock surface of Luna Island jutting up from the dropoff at the falls. In the two images above, you can see part of the wooden structure built to accommodate tourists wanting a closer view of Bridal Veil Falls.

As you can see from the photos, there is plenty of room for people to stand and options to exit the area without climbing to the closest viewpoint. The yellow rain gear is provided by the Niagara Falls State Park, the entity in charge of operating the attraction. Upon leaving, you can drop off the gear for recycling or take it with you if you plan to get close to the falls elsewhere.

Upon entering the scaffolding area, you start low near small rivulets that diverge from the main flow of Bridal Veil Falls. The entire area around the falls is wet from spray, so proper footwear is a must.

The Rainbow Bridge connects the United States and Canada over the Niagara River. I will feature a story about the bridge in a future post. That tall tower on the right is not connected to the bridge; it’s an observation tower on the American side. On the left in Canada, the Casino Tower is the tall tower to the right of the Sheraton Falls View Hotel.

I conclude this post with the original image I shared in June, which was the starting point of my experiment in AI removal of the scaffold structure. If you’d like to pixel peep or see the metadata from these images, you can view them in 2K HD here. By the way, I kept my D500 Nikon camera safely under my rain gear. I used my Samsung S20U cell phone for all the images taken from the scaffold. My cell phone was much better protected from the watery spray.

John Steiner