Monday, July 30, 2007

St. Mary's Falls

This weekend, David, Tracy and I took a backpacking trip to St. Mary's Falls, in St. Mary's Wilderness, off the Blue Ridge Parkway in the Appalachian Mountains. There was forecast of storms, and as we drove down the parkway, rain was falling, but we had borrowed the backpacks (we're buying the equipment incrementally, to try to keep costs down), we felt like we ought to use them since we had them. Pressing on was a good decision: not a drop fell on us.

It was Tracy's first time backpacking (though she'd camped before), and since David and I hadn't backpacked for three or four years, we decided to take it easy and do an overnight trip. We headed out Saturday afternoon, got the parking area about 5:00, and headed out in warm, sunny weather. It's a rugged trail - difficult in several places, with a pack on - mostly due to damage caused during the floods following Hurricane Katrina. It's not steep, though, and follows the bed of the stream all the way up to the falls, crossing and recrossing several times. And all along the way, there are small falls, many of them very pretty.

We reached the falls after about two and a quarter hours. It was getting late, the light was fast fading, and there was a couple playing in the water, so we continued on past the falls (following the advice we were given) to search for a campsite. The first one we happened upon had been taken by a couple that started just before us, so we pressed further upstream and found an even better spot at the top of some shallow falls, with a wide pool at their base. Though you can't see it in this picture, the site is above and to the left of the left-most fall. We hurriedly set up the tent, got the stove set up, started a fire in the fire pit, and ate our dinner (chicken fajitas with a chocolate mole sauce!). After washing everything up, we sat around fire for a bit and ate s'mores, before turning in.

Next morning, after a breakfast of pancakes beside the warmth of our rejuvenated fire, we set off to take photos of the prettiest of the falls that we had seen the evening before. I had my new neutral density filter with me, which is used in all but one of the pictures of falls shown here. It works great, but is far too dark (it transmits 0.1% of incoming light - that is, it makes things 1000x darker) for early-to-mid-morning light: the camera doesn't get enough light to let you frame the picture, focus, or use the auto-exposure - I ended up doing a lot of guess and check for exposures. Along the way back to the "main" falls, we happened upon this rattlesnake (which I was nearly on top of before actually seeing for what it was). He was sleepy and, though coiled, wasn't rattling or looking particularly aggressive, so I cautiously set up the tripod and took several pictures.

We spent probably half and hour at the falls, taking pictures - it was still too early for anyone else to be there - before heading back to eat a snack of fried eggs, wash up, and pack up to head out. Clouds rolled in, keeping things cool for our hike back to the car, which was nice, but still it didn't rain on us. We're looking forward to going back - and hopefully when the stream is higher and the falls more magnificent!

Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Falls

The weather has been glorious for the past week, so Tracy and David and I drove up to the Blue Ridge Parkway and hiked down to White Rock Gap Falls.

Well, it's nice to put it that way. Actually, on Saturday, Tracy and I went by ourselves in search of the falls, didn't have a map, and completely missed them. We followed trails on the wrong side of the mountain, in fact. But on Sunday, we did have a map (makes a big difference) and the hike was pleasant, short, and easy. The trail actually passes above the falls before making a big loop around to come again to the base of the falls: there are some short (~30-50ft) cliffs bordering the falls that the trail circumnavigates, rather than descending over. If you're brave and careful, you should be able to easily make it down the cliffs and save time.

I bought a new tripod, since the one I had wasn't rigid enough to make me happy when using it. Quantaray, not terribly expensive, but rated for 11lbs, not heavy itself, and quite stable. I didn't have a neutral density filter when I took these pictures (I've one on the way, now), but it was dark enough that I could get nice long exposure times with the lens stopped down to f22 - some 15 seconds for the photo above and some 30 seconds for the photo at left.

We hope to go back sometime after there's been some actual rain. It's dry here, and the falls are low - just trickles, really. You'll be seeing those photos after it happens.

Beach Report

I promised a post from my trip to the beach, so here it is. Sadly, there wasn't a lot to actually say about the trip to the beach. Nothing extraordinary happened (which can be viewed as a good thing, I suppose). It was a good week, but long - surprising for a vacation.

I took some photos, mostly of the sunrise at the beach and one sunset from the deck of one of our houses (an example of which is shown here). Sunrise/sunset photos have always eluded me, for some reason - I think there's something about the treatment of light during those conditions that I just don't understand. I tried, this time, to take each event at multiple exposure levels, with the idea of doing a by-hand high-dynamic-range composition. It seems unlikely that I'll actually allocate the time to do that (especially given the generally poor quality of the photos I took), but I at least have that option. Too often in the past I've thought "I wish I had multiple exposures for this!" and didn't, so this time I made sure of it.