We wanted strong sunny morning light for the Niagara Falls shoot and Monday morning gave us incredibly lovely and just a little warm summer sun.
What I didn't anticipate was that the mylar would be so reflective and hot. In hindsight I guess that NASA wants to use a kind mylar for solar sails so I shouldn't have been so surprised that the space I was working in would be SO shiny and reflective that it would also be about 10 degrees hotter. It also made all my process photographs filled with these little constellations of light flaring back at the camera. I imagine Terry's will be be too.
I decided the morning of the shoot that I should bring some of my colored 8 ft streamer curtains that I had in the studio so I could try to convey some of the illusion of the Niagara Falls lit up at night.I used a grand total of 12 curtain panels, 4 of which I attached together to make a double layer with silver attached over a purple or gold panel. Luckily these curtains come with four grommets attached at the top for hanging. Once you tear the mylar a little it's really easy to rip the whole piece in half, the grommets are key to hanging them securely without tearing the whole curtain.
I had to work close to the edge of the 8 ft switchback, I only dropped something once during the whole process, a Ziploc bag while we were cleaning up.
Here's the 24 foot curtain expanse along the switchback. 
Terry took roughly 75 photos of each sculpture- he'll use multiple images to come up with a more panoramic composite-it seems like a lot but he needs to bracketing the exposure and take photos from on point of view so he can get far more information into the shot. It took Terry about 15-20 minutes to get all the photographs while waiting for everything to be still. A slight breeze was maddening because all the leaves behind the piece moved not to mention the lightweight sparkly streamers. I tried to capture that part in little videos on my camera.
Sitting back at watching Terry was my favorite part of the shoot. It was really my only chance to be with the sculpture sit back and watch it move and sparkle. Much like a giant moving waterfall it was almost impossible just to see because of the motion and the light flaring. When I designed this piece I had thought the streamers would resemble the Falls from shape and strong vertical lines more than anything else. The motion the light created with any slight movement was a really pleasant surprise.
Considering we were on the Jones Falls trail we had relatively few visitors to the shot. Three groups of dog walkers, and a biker, this family and their new puppy seemed entranced by the sparkle, as they rounded the switchback one of the boys was walking backwards away from it so he could keep looking at it.
Finally clean up was quick and easy, each curtain or set of curtains got put into their own Zip lock bag and are back in storage in my studio to be used in new weavings.
