Crabtree Falls

Charlotte Vanverdeghem is visiting us from France this week and next. Next week we'll be at the O RO Ranch (expect photos when we return!) but for now, we're hanging out at home and doing stuff in the area. Yesterday, we braved the near 100º temperatures and hiked Crabtree Falls. Here's a photo of the lower portion of the falls. I'd taken my tripod in the car so I could shoot the falls with the neutral density, but some wiseguy told me there wasn't any water. And I believed him, since it was and had been so hot. This is handheld at 1/10 second; still has nice motion blur, even without the multi-second exposures possible with the ND and tripod. No good for pixel peeping, but plenty good at lower resolutions.


Here's another picture of the lower falls, with Charlotte in the foreground. Another handheld 1/10 second exposure - Charlotte held nice and still for me.


At one of our breaks, I caught her taking a picture. She was on top of a rock and I was below her shooting up. Despite the angle, it looks natural, and the angle generated fantastic fore- and background blur. No Photoshopping here - this is straight from the lens (with minor color correction).


It was hot, but there was a decent breeze near the water, which the trail followed pretty closely. So in spite of the heat, we pressed on and made it to the top. There, we had lunch and enjoyed the view before heading back. It was hazy, which was too bad, but the view from the summit was still impressive.


Tracy, however, refused to smile when I took a picture of her and Charlotte.

Short Hike

With the longer days, it's easier now to go on short hikes in the evenings after work. On Tuesday, Tracy and I went over to Chris Green to walk the border of the lake. We'd seen the trail from the boats, but never actually hiked over there. It was more a stroll than a hike, really, but was pretty. I borrowed David's camera and she borrowed mine - here are a few of the pictures we took.


Something's missing in this picture, sadly. It lacks the dreaminess of the spot and doesn't quite capture my original interest in the way the stream bed seemed to make a figure 8 - perhaps because you can only really see the bottom of the 8 here in the photo. It's even worse in black and white - too little contrast and too much uniformity of light.


Both of us like to look for small things - a reason we both would like to have a good macro lens. The lichen on the sticks caught our fancy - both of us shot several pictures of it. I ended up liking Tracy's pictures far more than mine - one of hers is shown above.


I shot this with David's camera. It has a feature called "Color Accent" that renders a scene in black and white except for one color value (plus or minus some built-in tolerance). It's surprisingly fun to use - fun especially because it's simple. It is, of course, the sort of thing one could do in post-processing using Photoshop, but having it right there on the camera means that you don't have to wait and don't have to wonder (as much) what the effect will be. I cranked the contrast and the saturation on this one. I like the boldness of the sudden green amidst the black and white.


This, surprisingly, is a beaver-gnawed stump - not some crude, unfinished sculpture (which it rather looks like to me). Again, Tracy's shots of this were much better than mine: the angle she chose makes the stump more dramatic and mysterious.


Something drew me to these seed pods - I took many pictures of them. The light was low and to get the aperture I wanted (for depth of field), I had to work pretty hard at keeping the camera steady. Overall, I managed to keep the sharpness good, but I suspect between asking the camera to focus and actually releasing the shutter, I frequently moved toward or away from my subject: the focal plane isn't ever quite where I would have liked it to be. Perhaps I'll go back with a tripod and try again.

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!

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.