Wednesday, January 5, 2022
Today was just a punchline for a cruel joke, but I made it work.
It all started late on Tuesday night when I started thinking that I might want to go out and get some more pictures this morning while the clouds were in the forecast. I wasn’t really wanting to go because I was actually quite tired from a very busy beginning of the year since I have worked an old rusty car as well as done a full day hike at Big Creek. I was content to just stay home and rest, but I also knew that while I was motivated to capture moving water, I needed to take advantage of the days that would allow it. Looking at the forecast, there were going to be high level clouds pretty much the entire day with just a minor break around 9am for pretty much all of the area. As I started to look at the detailed views, I found that the area of Connelly Springs, NC, was possibly looking the best with low clouds mixed in for the morning and then move moving in around 11am. It was looking like I was going to have my choice of when to go and work South Mountains State Park which I haven’t been to in a couple of years now. It was only about an hour and a half away from home, so it wouldn’t be the drain on time for driving that Big Creek had been.
I was kind of figuring that I would get there during mid-morning which would allow me to have most of the afternoon to work the area and try some compositions that I have not been quite happy with in the past. Toni was going to work early in the morning which meant that I would be able to check the weather again early in case anything had changed. I was going to leave it all up in the air as to when I was going to go, and even if I was going to go at all.
When Toni got in the shower, I started to wake up, but didn’t even want to look at the weather because I was quite comfortable curled up in the bed. The next thing I knew she was waking me up to tell me that she was headed to work. I talked a little bit, but really don’t know what it was that I said. It was enough to get my brain functioning though and I got the phone to look at the weather. Nothing had really changed, and Connelly Springs was under clouds at the moment with continued clouds through the day. They were going to be mostly high clouds which could either mean a mild overcast which I was hoping for, or these really thin clouds that just don’t make a difference at all. One of the other weather apps had the day as partly cloudy which meant that the clouds were probably not going to be significant at all. I decided that it really wasn’t worth it at all to drive out there with the clouds being so much in question, so I rolled over to go back to sleep.
I am the master of my bladder.
I am the master of my bladder!
This was chanted several times as I was trying to go back to sleep.
I’m not the master of my bladder after all.
Well, I was now up and awake well before sunup. I actually had time to get to the park around 8am which would be when the light was starting to get right, but before the sun would be shining on the lower parts of High Shoals Falls which I was planning on working on the most. I might as well go, because I’ve had good luck there with a full sun, so even if I had a few clouds, I would be doing better than that day. I went to the kitchen to make some breakfast. I was hankering some Cream of Wheat and knew that we had some milk that needed to be used since it expired in a couple of days which meant that I was going to have it really creamy this morning. I got it all mixed together and cooked and poured the last of the milk in a glass to drink. I took my first bite and thought that it had a much stronger flavor than normal, but it had been a while since I had made it with milk, so I took another bite.
No, something wasn’t right. I sipped the milk from the glass to put my suspicions to the test. Milk is not supposed to be tangy, is it? Well, this jug was and that kind of upset me greatly. I poured out the entire bowl which I had been so looking forward to and started to look for something that didn’t include milk for breakfast. I settled on some bagels and went about my morning. Feeling that the worst of the day was behind me, I loaded the truck up and started South. I stopped to get gas and then managed to get stuck behind a tractor trailer on Hwy18 who’s speed was between 40-65mph. Of course, the faster speeds were only in the areas where I could pass, otherwise, we were just poking along. It took about 15 miles before I had a chance to pass him which wasn’t the easiest thing in the 4Runner with the oversized tires. I got around him and started to look into the sky since the sun was coming up. There were great clouds overhead and I was very happy about that.
However….
The closer I got to the park, the clearer the sky became. The few clouds that were left didn’t have enough density to do anything with the sun at all. I considered heading back home but decided that I was already halfway there so I might as well continue on. As I got to the mountains, I noticed that there were some nice clouds hanging around at the mountains themselves which was enough to give me hope. I knew that I would be in the shade but didn’t remember how long that would last. Hopefully, I would have at least a couple of hours before the sun hit the water and added lots of contrast to the scene. If I was really lucky, the few clouds would position themselves between me and the sun.
By the time I got to the park, all evidence of clouds had been removed from the sky and it was looking like a beautiful day for a normal person. Photographers are not normal, and that clear blue sky was not boding well for the morning. I got parked and grabbed my gear because I knew I had to get moving if I was going to beat the sunshine on the landscape. The hike wasn’t a long one at all, but there are several areas that I like to stop and work before I get to the main event. I saw them, and thought that they looked decent, but I didn’t stop to do anything with them for fear of losing the good light. I had been hoping that the water flow would be something like what it had been at Big Creek, but from what I was seeing that wasn’t the case here at all. The flow looked to be just slightly above average, and I had photographed this amount of water several times in the past.
When I got to the lower section of the main waterfall (which is much more interesting than High Shoals itself), I wasn’t overly impressed with the looks of things. One area that I like to photograph had a bunch of debris around it, and there was really no composition to be had. A little further down the trail from the boardwalk, I saw the other section that I liked to work with. Part of it was obscured by a large branch that was disrupting the flow of water at the base. The only segment that was left was the balanced rock that I actually do love to photograph. Fortunately, this was one of the main reasons for me coming here today because I’ve shot this portion many times but have yet to get a perfect composition on it. I have battled with the tree that is beside it and runs diagonal across the view of the falls itself. I was hoping that I would be able to do something different with it this time.
I went ahead and hopped over the railing (kids, don’t try this), and rock hopped to the area that I thought would be the best to work from. I knew approximately where I was going to need to stand since I had photographed this location quite a number of times. Looking at the scene, I decided that I would probably be using a narrow crop because the sun was already hitting the landscape above the scene, and I was wanting to avoid that contrast to the scene. I loaded up my standard lens with a polarizer and started to work out a composition. I kept running into the same problems that I always do here with the tree and the bright background above and to the right. No matter what I did, I just couldn’t get the composition that I really wanted.
Instead of fighting with it, I decided to embrace the background as it was a very warm tone from the bare trees mixed with the blues of the sky. I backed up as far as I could go and racked the lens out to 24mm. I was able to get the corner of the sky, but it was very much too bright. I swapped out the simple polarizer, for the 105mm one mounted to my filter holder which allowed me to add in a 2-stop hard edge ND Grad to pull the exposure down in that corner. The exposure was looking good, but I wasn’t sold on the composition. I was wanting to go wider, but this lens wouldn’t allow that. I went ahead and swapped out the lens which was no simple task as I was balanced on rocks, and the tripod was perched rather precariously itself.
I managed to get the 16-35mm loaded onto the camera and the filter holder (Still holding the two filters) switched over as well. I was back in business, and I started to recompose with the wider lens. I was liking it much better this way, but the sun was getting a good bit brighter. Looking at the image review I was seeing that there was just too much disparity between the corner lighting and the main subject. I swapped out the 2-stop for a 3-stop which did the trick. I just knew that I was going to be doing a lot of finessing in post to get the division line worked out. I would have rather used a soft edge grad, but that wouldn’t have given me enough strength to control the sky like I needed done. It was just what I was having to do in order to get the shot and I was happy that I had the tools available to allow me to do just that.
Not long after I swapped out the lens, I saw that the scene was getting foggy. Well, it wasn’t getting foggy, but the photographs that I was creating made it look like it was. Normally if a lens or filter is going to fog, it will do so much sooner than this, so I was a little confused as to what was going on. I pulled out the grad filter and it was fine with the only fogging at the corners. I wiped it down just to be safe and slid it back in. I then popped off the polarizer and found that was the culprit. I wiped it down, but it still wanted to fog over. It took me a while to get it to calm down and I can only assume that it was due to a slight change in the temperature and humidity while I was standing there. After a few more minutes I was back at it again.
I had been working this one waterfall for about 30 minutes at this point and was finally starting to dial in the composition that I was after. I could tell that the colors were way off on the back of the camera which I had run into here before. When shooting in the shade, the temperature and tint are always screwed up in the camera, even when I have it set for shade white balance. It was still just too cool with a very green tint to the whole scene. I knew that in addition to dealing with the sky and the transition below that, I was going to have to do a lot of color correcting to get the actual scene to present accurately. I was just hoping that I had enough wiggle room in the pixels to allow that to happen. I was pretty sure that I had everything that I could manage from this subject, so I started to look around for other potential compositions. Most of what I like to shoot here was messed up due to fallen trees that interrupted the flow of the water though.
I did see some isolations that I was interested in capturing so I once again did the dance with the lenses. I swapped out my wide-angle lens for my telephoto which would get me up close and personal with the different features of water. I slid the grad filter back into its wallet storage and just left the polarizer attached for the rest of this series. There turned out to be one isolation that I thought worked rather well out of the three or four that I worked on. There were some deep shadows in the back that really helped carve out the shape of the water as it spilled onto a rock below. If you look closely, you will see where this isolation fits in with the rest of the scene that was already photographed. The tripod was moved only a few inches to get the composition that I wanted between the two images which shows you the power of the different lenses.
When I was relatively satisfied that I had what I needed from here, I packed up the camera and did the rock hop back to the boardwalk. I did a double check of a couple of other compositions that I know of while looking for others. I didn’t find any, and I could tell that the sun was starting to become a problem. With that in mind, I started back towards the truck. As I was hiking back, I stopped at a section that I had seen on the way in. The sun hadn’t quite gotten to it yet, so I tried to figure out a quick composition. I pulled out the long lens once again and started to dial in an isolation that I was going to be happy with. I shot about a dozen variations on this before calling it quits. It was a fair composition but wasn’t really all that inspired so it never made it to the final editing point.
By the time I was done here, the sun was really starting to cause problems, so I just packed it all in, and tethered the tripod to the side of the bag to make the hike a bit easier. I was done, and just a little disappointed with the trip. I had expected another day like I had at Big Creek, but that hadn’t happened. I would love to blame it on the lack of clouds and that surely played a part, but it was mostly that I just wasn’t hit by any of the scenes that I had been looking at. There was nothing really different about how things were looking compared to what I had seen before, and I just wasn’t quite feeling the location this time around. I was really hoping that the one picture turned out that I had been working so hard with early on (first image in the post). I wasn’t sure that it would work out though since there were just so many technical hurdles to get over in order to get that image to really work. I knew that the RAW capture looked horrible with the dark shadows and greenish, blue tint across the whole scene. The isolations were ho-hum at best, so I was left with very little hope of the same kind of results that I had from Big Creek.
An odd thing happened as I was passing the fork in the stream though. This was the same way that I had come in and the same path that I had taken at least a dozen times over the years. There has never been an intersection here that I was aware of, and I hadn’t seen it coming in. In my defense, I was concentrating on getting to the lower portion of the falls and I was on auto pilot to get there. On the way back, I was lost in my thoughts and not really paying attention. I was relying on that auto pilot to get me back to the truck and I had no doubt that I could trust it to do so. However, I came to a trail sign that I was not familiar with that made mention of Big Bear Falls. This was not one that I was familiar with and had no idea that there was another waterfall here at the park. It was only a 0.2 mile hike to get to it which wouldn’t take me any time at all. I looked up at the sky and saw nothing but blue sky which meant that I was probably not going to have good light once I got there. It was worth checking out though.
The hike was easy, and it looked like the trial was relatively new. I kind of remember some equipment at that junction the last time I was there, so it was probably being cut at that point. A lot has changed in two years that is for sure. When I got to the end of the trail, I found the waterfall which I was expecting to be rather pedestrian. Well, it wasn’t. I actually really loved this waterfall for the shape that it had and the pool that it flowed into. It was in the full light with several dark shadows going across the face of the waterfall which really complicated the compositional possibilities. It was good enough that I pulled the camera out to try some test compositions in the hope that the sun would find a cloud to hide behind. I shot these with the 24-70mm lens which worked very well for both landscape and portrait orientations. I loved the compositions, and the variations on the compositions that I shot. What I didn’t like was the shadows on the face of the waterfall. Had it not been for the trees behind me, and one rocky ledge, this waterfall would have been a piece of cake to shoot in full daylight. In fact, the colors of the pool and the rocks around it benefited from the sunlight. It was just such a shame that the shadows ruined the composition. I worked the falls for about 30 minutes and had figured out how I wanted to shoot it…should the clouds come.
Recalling the weather forecast, this was about the time that the clouds were going to start building up again, so I didn’t want to abandon the location just yet. I ended up shooting some isolations around the waterfall, and downstream a little bit. It was the latter location that yielded the only image worth keeping. It also suffered from the direct sunlight, but at least the shadows weren’t nearly as offensive to the composition. I just played with the shutter speed for a bit so that I could get a bit of texture in the water while really focusing my attention on the reddish rocks around the slightly teal colored water. I burned up another 15 or so minutes here waiting on the clouds to work with me. They never did.
I wrote this location off as a great scouting attempt and I will return here again. I have some really good ideas for this waterfall, and I am looking forward to seeing just how they turn out when the light is right for it. I hated to trash the good ones that I shot of it today, but I would have had to do some very heavy cloning of the shadows which I was only able to minimize with dodging. It was going to require more processing than I felt comfortable doing because it was firmly in the “fix it in Photoshop” realm which I don’t care to do.
Before you start to call me out on how I shot the first scene knowing that I was going to be doing a lot of processing to that image, there is a very significant difference in what I was looking at between the two images. In the first case, I was going to be correcting some very awkward lighting that was due to the waterfall being in the deep shade while portions of the scene were in full sunlight which was very warm. I was just going to have to balance the color temperature and tint between the two areas, and then blend in the effect of the grad filter that I had used to keep the exposure under control. There was actually nothing about the scene that was changed from how I saw it through the post processing. Big Bear Falls on the other hand suffered from a physical problem that complicated the composition. It was several shadows that were going fully across the scene that would have been removed. That was a significant change to the scene and one that would make the image a lie since it was photographed in the full sun where the shadows would always come into play. Had I gone through with the manipulation of the image, I would have been presenting a scene that could never have happened and didn’t feel comfortable with that, at least not on the scale that I would have had to deal with.
I do want to be honest in my photography and present images that are accurate to how I saw them, and how they made me feel at the time. I don’t want to become a digital artist where the photograph is just part of the ingredients for the final image. I want the photograph to be the image, and I want the scene that you see to be the same one that I saw. Sound fair?
I do hope that you enjoyed this trek. It was full of little mini-issues, and looking back on it, I probably would have been better off staying at home. The one good part from the day was that the opening image is pretty much just what I was hoping for. It was that single success from the day that made the trek worthwhile, and I am glad that I went. I also had the opportunity of learning about a new waterfall that I had not seen before which is insanely easy to hike to. I now have the motivation to return here again which I probably wouldn’t have had without it. While this was nowhere near as fruitful of a trip as Big Creek was, I might have come away with an even better outcome that will lead to some new images in the near future.
If you are interested in how I go about forming my compositions in the landscape, I have a mini workshop scheduled for May that might be perfect for you. It will be held at Doughton Park on the Blue Ridge Parkway on May 14th and is titled “Compositions in the Landscape.” This is by no means an advanced workshop as it is really designed to just get you thinking about different ways that you might go about forming compositions when you are out with the camera. I like to think about it as bringing order to the chaos that is nature. Regardless of your experience level, if you would like some help with your compositions, this is the workshop for you. Be sure to get signed up soon, because I have a lot of interest in this one. I do expect that it might actually fill up before May comes.
Also, if you are looking for wall art, or just really love the images that you see here on the website. I would love to discuss getting you matched up with a print of your choice. You can either order directly from the website, or you can email, or call to discuss other options. There are almost an endless number of options available for you print of choice. There is no time like the present to get your order started so you can have a beautiful piece of unique wall art hanging in your home or office.
Until next time….
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