Heye - Otto: Magic Forests Little Brook 1000 Piece Jigsaw Puzzle

A stream running green through a beech gorge in autumn, shot on a long exposure so the water has gone to silk. From Heye's Magic Forests series, and the water is both the best and the hardest part of it.

What you are looking at

A narrow limestone gorge with a brook running down the middle of it. The rock is pale grey and water-smoothed, cut into rounded shelves and boulders. Along the right bank, a stand of beeches with trunks completely wrapped in bright green moss, standing on a thick carpet of rust-red fallen leaves.

The canopy above is still half in leaf, yellow-green and thinning, and the far end of the gorge disappears into pale mist. The water itself is an extraordinary jade green in the deeper pools and pale blue-white where it runs shallow, and because the exposure was long it has no texture at all, just smooth flowing bands.

What it is like to build

The long exposure is the thing to understand before you start. Everywhere else in this picture is high texture: moss, bark, leaf litter, fractured rock. The water is the exact opposite, a smooth region with soft gradients and no edges. So the puzzle is unusually polarised, and the water is where the hours go.

Do the red leaf litter first. It is the largest easy region, it is a colour that appears nowhere else, and it fills the whole bottom right. Then the mossy trunks, which are vertical, hard edged and the brightest green in the frame.

Then the rock, sorting on the wet line. The boulders are pale grey where dry and much darker where the water has been over them, and that boundary runs consistently through the picture.

Leave the water and sort it by colour temperature, jade in the pools, blue-white in the runs, and work downstream from the top where it is narrowest.

Why Heye

Heye are German and their catalogue is built on licensing rather than stock imagery, which applies to their photographic series as much as their illustrated ones: Magic Forests is a consistent body of work rather than a bag of nature shots. The pieces are cut for a firm fit, which is what you want on a smooth water region.

Specifications

A little context

Long-exposure water shows up all over landscape photography and it is worth recognising on a box before you buy, because it reliably adds an hour or two. Smooth water has no grain to sort on, so it behaves like a sky rather than like a river. That is not a reason to avoid it, it is a reason to know what you are taking on. The same trick is at work in Milan Canals, where the whole canal becomes a mirror.

Stock is real and it is in Sydney. Free shipping Australia wide over $150, and free same-day delivery inside 6 km of North Bondi with no minimum.

Built it already? Use the Questions section below and tell us how you found it. Which part fought you, how long it took, and whether you would send someone else to it. We answer every one.