Saturday, January 15, 2022
You might be wondering where I’ve been lately since I had gotten in a habit of doing blog entries every few days. Or, you might not have even noticed that I’ve been gone. When I last left you, I had just come back from a trek to South Mountains State Park where I found a brand-new waterfall. At least it was a new waterfall for me and appears to be down a trail that has just recently been cleared by the park staff. At any rate, I was really happy to have found this waterfall because I thought that it was probably the prettiest in the park by a slim margin. The problem that I had with it was that the sky was totally clear, and the sun was much too harsh on the scene for me to get a good photograph of. I did try it though and spent a good deal of time working out different compositions which convinced me that this would be worth a return trip at some point in the future when the weather was better.
After that trek, the weather pretty much stayed clear and cold which meant that I was going to be staying in for the most part. I had a product shoot that I needed to get done, so I got things set up in the studio to do that. It went well, and I learned some new things that I could do with the studio equipment that I had on hand which was very beneficial for future product shoots that I might do. Shortly after that Toni and I left for Pigeon Forge for an anniversary trip. We left on Sunday afternoon and came back on Thursday afternoon. It was a really nice trip and while it was odd not to have my camera with me, it was a nice little vacation from photography for a while. We spent the week together and doing things that we both enjoyed quite a bit. It was also nice to come home and not have photographs to process and a blog to write. However, what should have been a relaxing homecoming turned into something a little more involved. On the way back, I managed to get a really bad chip in the windshield of the 4Runner which I knew would be growing quickly with the upcoming winter storm that was on the way.
After we picked up milk…no, this was not snow related milk, it was just time to get more. Anyway, after we picked up milk, I called the glass shop that I use in Winston and found out that they had an opening at 4pm that I could make. I went home and dropped Toni off and the luggage and was back on the road again to Winston. I also grabbed the kerosene container with the hopes of grabbing some kerosene for the heater just in case we lost power over the weekend. The windshield repair went smoothly, and I was back on the road headed home before my actual appointment time which was nice. I then spent about 20 minutes going from gas station to gas station looking for kerosene. Turning up with nothing, Toni even started to help by calling around. Most were out of it, and she was only able to find a 5 gallon can of it at Tractor Supply. She found that out after I had gotten home, so she really helped me out and went to pick it up while I was getting things set up for a workshop that I had agreed to do while on our trip.
This is going to be a classroom workshop through the Wilkes Art Gallery scheduled for Saturday, February 19th, from 10-1pm. They had called and asked for a photography workshop and left it up to me for the content. Since I had done the Introduction to the Art of Photography last year, I didn’t want to revisit that topic again. Plus, that is a very involved class from what I am finding out the more I teach it. I decided to whittle it down a good bit and focus on one aspect which I could teach a class on. What I decided to do was a class that I am calling Demystifying Exposure in the Digital World, which is all about the different ways to achieve the exposure you are after with a digital camera. This will be the first time that I have taught this class and i had no material for it ready to go. Since they were wanting to release the workshop on Friday, I was needing to get that workshop description put together which was why Toni was so helpful in picking up the kerosene.
Now that we were ready for the upcoming winter storm which was supposed to get started around mid-afternoon on Saturday, I had some time to start looking at the possibility of going out to get some snow pictures. That is something that I really don’t do a lot of because after 20 years of having to drive in the snow and ice as a police officer, I am very happy to sit my retired butt in a recliner and watch the snow falling from the sky. However, I already had salt spray on the truck, and felt that was a good first step in getting some new snow photographs. With that in mind, I started to really look at the weather to see what I was going to be dealing with. There were going to be clouds pretty much all day with the snow starting a little later in the afternoon than what I had originally thought. If I played my cards right, I would be out in the groove of things when the snow started, and I might be able to get some interesting images at that point. I just needed to figure out where I wanted to go to get started.
With the snow getting pushed back in the day, and the first part of the day just having high clouds with some mid-level ones mixed in, I was worried about texture in the sky. I felt pretty sure that there would be nice even light at least, but I doubted that there would be enough interest in the sky to carry a photograph. Thinking along those lines, I considered South Mountains and Big Bear Falls. It wasn’t all that far away, and I knew exactly what I wanted to shoot. In fact, getting that waterfall crossed off my list would make it easier to focus on the next location that I wanted to shoot much easier. Taking all that into consideration, by the time I was going to bed I had pretty much decided that I would wake up when Toni left to go to work and get started with my day.
When she was getting her stuff loaded into the car, I started to wake up and saw her off. I then looked at the weather which surprised me a little bit. It was showing clear skies over all of the areas that I was monitoring on the weather app. Looking at the hourly, it was looking like the clouds would be coming in around mid-day and the snow was pushed back again starting overnight. This wasn’t going to work at all. I looked at another app which had detailed cloud forecasts and found that they were showing the clouds to be building right around sunrise and getting thicker through the morning. Again, the snow was going to be well after dark according to this one as well. The question was whether or not I was going to have clouds overhead to keep the light good for a waterfall shoot. I decided to get up and get a few things done in the office before I made a decision.
By the time I had things wrapped up in the office, the sun was out, and I could see which app was correct. I walked upstairs and looked out. There were clouds overhead and it looked like they were thick enough to really count with the lighting. I guess Clear Outside won out and that was what I was going to make my decision on. I grabbed my gear and started out towards South Mountains once again. While I was headed that way, the sky went through several stages when I thought that it was going to clear up, but the clouds returned. When I got to the park, the lighting was just perfect, and I was feeling quite fortunate that I had decided to come out this way. The clouds were no good for photographing, but they were providing some really good lighting, and it was going to work out great for the new waterfall which was just a short hike down the way.
As I was making my way to Big Bear Falls, I noted that the water was down a little from what it was the last time. It wasn’t a big difference, but there was a noticeable drop in the level. I just hoped that it wouldn’t adversely affect the appearance of the waterfall which I loved with the flow that I was seeing last time. It wasn’t long before I had my answer. The reduced flow didn’t help the waterfall any, but it didn’t really hurt it either. The part that I really enjoyed about this one was the colors which were still quite vivid. The greens of the water with the warm reddish/orange tones of the rocks were still quite vibrant even though the sun wasn’t shining on them. The waterfall still had a lot of character to it, but it wasn’t as full as it had been. I wasn’t sure how this would translate into my photographs though.
Since I was already kind of familiar with the compositions that were possible here, I selected my 16-35mm lens. I had done all of my practice compositions with a 24-70mm and knew that I was leaning more towards the wide angle for this waterfall and wanted to have more options on that end of the spectrum. Of course, I fitted my polarizer as well so that I could cut through the glare of the water’s surface to really get to the colors beneath. The Color Combo Polarizer was also perfectly suited to this situation because it helped saturate the warmer tones which would give the rocks a bit more punch in the image. With the camera built I got into position and started to work out my first composition.
I ran into some issues that I hadn’t really seen before since the lighting was so harsh the first time. I had to be very careful with the rock outcropping that was to the right of the falls because it could very easily distract from the overall composition with the shadow underneath. I played around with some of the ideas that I had before and found a few that I liked. I also took the time to work out a shutter speed that fit the flow of the waterfall. I found that about a half second was looking good on the LCD, but I did several different exposures for each composition so I could decide which I liked better when I got home. I knew that I wasn’t really liking this waterfall as much as I had thought I would. It just lacked the drama that I felt that it possessed from my first meeting. I took a little break and just stood there and took it all in. I needed the waterfall to tell me how it wanted me to photograph it because what I was getting so far was just the postcard shot and that just wasn’t good enough.
After about 15 minutes of just experiencing the waterfall, I started to make a plan for a different composition. I had found that from the less appealing angle for the waterfall, there was a really nice feature in the water. One of the rocks that was right at the surface of the water had a portion scooped out from erosion. The inside of the void was green like the base of the pool, but the rock was orange which I thought made for a great contrast. It wasn’t all that dominant in the scene, but I had a wide-angle lens attached which possesses magical qualities when it comes to foregrounds. I had my composition figured out, I just had to get it framed up.
I started off with a horizontal composition and found that it worked very well at 16mm. I shot the bracketed image with the different shutter speeds just to make sure that when I got home I would have at least one that I liked. As it turned out, with this composition, the magic number was 2.5 seconds which was a lot longer of a duration than I had anticipated. Since this was almost a waterslide, I didn’t want to lose the definition in the water, but with the distance that the water was traveling it just took it a while to progress through the frame. Just over two seconds gave the right mix of smooth and texture that I was after, but the odd thing was that didn’t hold true for other compositions.
When I found the visual relationship that I wanted, I started to play around with things, and I flipped the camera to portrait orientation and recomposed. This time, I put even more emphasis on the foreground rock which I loved. The tradeoff here was that I lost some of the pool, and the shape of that pool that helped to frame the waterfall. I still really liked this composition and committed to it with the different shutter speeds. This one happened to be shot with the lens at 17mm, so roughly the same as before, but the shutter speed that was needed to arrive at the look I was after was only one second. I’m really not sure why the change in shutter speeds, because the two images are much more similar than you would think with the difference in exposure time.
It was these images that I shot well into the session that turned out to be my favorites from this waterfall. It was that inclusion of the strong foreground element that made the photograph, I think. It was another case of filling the frame with what I liked after asking myself those two simple questions of what I liked and what I didn’t like. Even though I had spent some time working out compositions before in the harsh sunlight, it was the light itself that had a lot to do with what compositions would actually work. Without the dramatic light of the sun, this waterfall seemed to become a little boring photographically. Flat light will do that, and it is something that I am used to dealing with since that is my preferred lighting for most of my landscape subjects. What I was missing with the light, I was able to make up for with the foreground which happened to be at that perfect angle to add visual tension to the scene. It was a learning experience, but I must say that my initial thoughts about this waterfall were pretty much right on the money. Overall, this is the best waterfall at South Mountains State Park because of the colors and the appearance of the scene. It requires a bit of work to get the positioning right, but if you spend the time, you will be well rewarded for the effort.
The lower falls which are right off of the boardwalk are still some of my favorites to work with in this park, but the difficulty involved in getting into a photographic position is a negative. Due to that difficulty, there are only a few compositions that can be worked which limits the appeal of these individual scenes. Even with all that in mind, both Big Bear Falls and the lower falls are miles better than the main attraction for the park which is High Shoals Falls. I have tried that waterfall several times and I have never really seen it look photogenic. I’m fine with the average hiker blasting past the waterfalls that I think are the most beautiful here in order to see the biggest one. The more that they do that, less crowded my favorite locations will be.
Speaking of crowding, I usually don’t like going to do waterfalls on the weekends because that is when everyone is out enjoying nature. When I first scouted this waterfall, I ran into a lone hiker which came in as I was leaving which was not a problem at all. Based on the number of cars in the parking lot, it would appear that this waterfall is just not that well known yet. Today, I ran into two hikers while I was working some isolations like the photograph above. They were quiet and sneaky with their hiking. I remember getting to a finishing point with the long lens and did my customary visual sweep of the area to see if there was anything else that I wanted to photograph. As I turned around, I saw two hikers standing on the large rock behind me looking at the waterfall. They caught me a little off-guard and I have no idea how long they had been there. I just hope that they didn’t catch me talking to myself as I was working out the isolations. I waved at them and moved out of their way so they could enjoy the waterfall without a photographer standing there in the way. I was done with it, and had no more ideas for compositions.
As I was hiking back to the truck, I was noticing that the shadows were starting to get deeper along the trail. The clouds were apparently clearing off which I wasn’t expecting since the most accurate weather forecast showed increasing clouds through the day. Oh well, they were clearing and there was nothing that I could do about it. I was happy that I was able to get the waterfall photographed finally. I wasn’t sure if I had any good ones or not, but I was excited about that last overall composition that I had shot with the foreground rock. I felt that was probably going to be a good one. If that was all that I had out of the 60-some images I had shot, I was going to be happy. I’m less concerned with quantity these days and am much more interested in quality. Even if I had only one image from the day, I was still going to count it as a win. I was still looking forward to getting some snow images as well.
As I was driving home, I noticed that the sun was back behind the clouds, but the clouds were really not that interesting. It did give me hopes to be able to photograph a few locations that I had been seeing along the way. I stopped at one such spot where there were some old barns and an old house. I should have stopped the other day on the way to the park because the lighting was perfect on it, but I didn’t want to miss out on the clouds for the waterfall. Lesson learned on that one, but I decided to stop off here and see what could be done for compositions. The light was good, but the sky was very blah overhead. There was a bit of density to the clouds, and I was thinking I might be able to bring out some of the detail in post. I grabbed my long lens since the barn I wanted to shoot was well off the road. I didn’t add any filters because I wasn’t sure if it was going to be worth shooting or not. I tried a couple of different locations and shot a few frames. None of them were all that great and they lacked depth since I was only including a bit of the sky. I wasn’t happy with the angle of the barn in the photographs either, so ultimately, after four frames I just packed up the camera and headed back home. When I pulled them into Lightroom, I tried to work the best out of the four as a black and white image because I could do more with the sky without the colors. No matter what I did with the image it was still a boring composition and I ultimately trashed the bunch of them. It was a good chance to see how the compositions would work in case I found great light again. Honestly though, I am not sure that the compositions would work even in great light. There just isn’t enough visual interest around the barn to pull it off.
I was thinking that I was done for the day and just worked my way home. As I was driving through Boomer, I got to my turn and happened to look off to the right. I was pretty sure that I had driven down that way before, but I didn’t remember what was down there. I got turned around and just purely by chance went the opposite way on the road that would take me home. There was an old structure on the side of the road that looked like it was maybe a small barn, but when I drove past it, I realized that I had been looking at the back of the building. That building was actually the Boomer General Store which was in perfect condition for a photograph. I got very excited about it and looked at it in my rearview mirror as I considered stopping for a picture. What I saw didn’t make me happy though.
There was a Dollar General situated behind the store, across the highway. Of course, this didn’t do anything for telling the story of the general store, and it also reminded me that I had been passing these Dollar Generals about once every other mile. I mean, there are more Dollar Generals out there than power poles it seems. Speaking of power poles, there was a pole on either side of the general store as well as a stop sign at the intersection. In other words, I had a lousy background for the store, and I wasn’t going to be able to pick my shooting location from the front of the store since I was going to have to figure out how to get between poles, signs, and power lines. Had this been a barn, I wouldn’t have bothered with it because of all of the compositional hurdles I was going to have to deal with. However, this wasn’t a barn at all. This was an old general store, and one that was in great shape for a photograph. The sky was even kind of interesting above it.
I got turned around and turned down the side street. I noticed the “No Trespassing” sign on the front of the building (cloning is a wonderful thing) which was going to make getting a photograph even more interesting. I did see that when I got very close to the store, that I was going to be able to cover the Dollar General with the store if I used a wide enough angle lens. It was just possible enough that I could make this work that I decided to give it a try. I parked on the side of the street and grabbed my camera with the 16-35mm lens attached once again. I also added the polarizer to get the glare out of the glass and the roof. I went over and started to figure out how best to compose this image.
The best angle was the one that is posted here, but it was not that simple to get. There were two outbuildings located just to the right of the frame which I would have loved to include, but that would have forced the inclusion of a power pole as well which I didn’t want. By cropping in on the right, just inbound of the roof of the closest building, I could avoid everything but the traffic on the highway. That was going to be a matter of timing. On the left side of the scene, I had a long metal building that was going to be in the frame. I had to figure out how best to deal with that and decided that I would just get the length of it without the front which would add too much detail. I would crop the other end off so that the extra building would be a little less obvious in the frame since it was just layers of color in the background. With the side figured out, I was happy that the bare tree in the background came up over the roof far enough to give a little interest to the sky. I was hoping that the slight cloud detail I was seeing would translate well into the photograph, but I wasn’t totally sure about that. I was seeing an opportunity for a minimally saturated composition where the only thing that really stood out was the Coke logo at the top of the siding.
I shot a good number of frames with slightly different compositions and different cloud formations before I called it quits here. With these images, I was happy to head home and see what I had. This general store turned into a favorite for the day. When I finally got the image selected out of the bunch, I started the editing process on it with the intention of it being a washed-out color palette. However, the more I worked the image, the more colors started to come out and I really liked how it was looking. I embraced the colors and even added saturation very strategically. I could just hear the floorboards creaking as I was working the image which made me very happy. It amazed me that I had passed this by so many times and never realized what was on the other side from what I had seen. There was just something calling out to me to make that turn and I’m glad that I did.
In fact, I’m so glad that I took this morning as an opportunity to get out with the intentions of being out when the snow started. Even though the snow never came, I managed to get some really good photographs of Big Bear Falls which is a completely new waterfall for me in an often-visited park. Even though I made a swing and a miss at an old barn, I was richly rewarded for the follow-up effort at the general store which rounded out a fantastic day with the camera. I’m not sure what tomorrow will hold since they keep pushing the precipitation back and its looking like an ice event more than snow. If things work out tomorrow, I will try to get out and get some good snowy scenes.
In the meantime, if any of these images speak to you, I would love the opportunity to match you up with a print. You can order directly from my gallery store here, or you can email me at [email protected] to discuss other sizes and media. There is just no better way to enjoy my photography than in its intended print form. Don’t forget about my upcoming classroom workshop in February, as well as the newly added Spring Landscape Workshop at Stone Mountain. If you just want to spend a few hours with a mini-workshop, I have one coming up in May dealing with building a composition at Doughton Park. There is a lot going on here in the next few months, so get signed up now to ensure that you have your space locked in.
Thank you for joining me on this trek to South Mountains State Park. I hope that you enjoyed the dear diary entry and the photos from the day. It was a lot of fun, and it was good to get back out with the camera again after my little vacation. Hopefully I’ll be back at it again tomorrow with some very different conditions, but even if that doesn’t happen, January has already started off being a very productive month for me.
Until next time….
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