Views of an Ohio Waterfall

Waterfalls, Ohio.  Oh come on, there aren’t any waterfalls in Ohio are there?  This is the comment I heard from a friend when I talked about shooting waterfalls in Ohio.  There are a number of falls spread around the state and some of the nicest are to be found in Hocking Hills State Park near Logan Ohio.  The park is made up of 5 distinct areas including Old man’s Cave, Cedar Falls, Cantwell Cliffs, Ash Cave and the Rock House.  All of the areas have extensive hiking trails and a number of them are handicap accessible.

As you can see from the photos below the Upper Falls at Old Man’s Cave are very picturesque and well worth short hike from the parking area. 

Nikon D300,  Tamron 18-200mm f/4.5-6.3 @ 42mm,  ISO 200,   1/250 @ f/4.5

This is the photo I took as I arrived at the falls.  I set up my tripod, attached the camera, composed the view and clicked the shutter button.  This is a nice view of the falls.  I think the composition is pretty good and the colors look just as I saw them on location.  I used a fairly high shutter speed of 1/250^th of a second.  This froze the water falling down the rocks adding to a feeling of speed and maybe power.  This is a shot that I am happy with.

I also wanted to capture the same view but with the classic “silky water” effect so popular in waterfall pictures.  Here is my take on that.

Nikon D300,  Tamron 18-200mm f/4.5-6.3 @ 42mm,  ISO 100,   1/5 @ f/29

For this shot I needed a considerably slower shutter speed.  I upped my aperture setting to f/29 but that only got me down to 1/15^th of a second.  The results were good but not quite what I was looking for.  The default sensitivity for the D300 is ISO 200 so I needed to lower that sensitivity some.  Nikon offers settings of LO 0.3, LO 0.7 and LO 1 to get lower than the default.  I set it to LO 1 which is the equivalent of ISO 100.  With the aperture set to f/29 that got me down to 1/5^th of a second which gave me much closer to what I was looking for.  

Ideally I would have liked to shoot at 1 to 2 seconds which likely would have given me an even silkier look.  Unfortunately that will have to wait for either a dark, cloudy day or my purchase of a couple of neutral density filters.

After shooting the overall view I decided to zoom in, recompose and get a shot of only a portion of the scene.

Nikon D300,  Tamron 18-200mm f/4.5-6.3 @ 42mm,  ISO 200,   1/250 @ f/4.5

Here I had reset my ISO back to the default, worrying that Nikon’s warning of lower contrast at the LO settings might not work with this view.  (I shouldn’t have worried as the middle photo shows).  Without the bridge in the background you lose the sense of scale that was present in the other views.  You can’t tell how tall the falls are.

I probably took 25 or 30 shots of Upper Falls that afternoon.  Several of them are quite good.  Others, not so much but by spending enough time shooting, recomposing and shooting again I’m happy with the results.  Next time though, I will try to take a neutral density filter or two with me to give me more exposure options.

Find out if you have some hidden gems like Hocking Hills in your area.

© Tim Marks 2009

Comments

[Dominique]

The Hocking Hills area is a great place to take photos, and I like the fact that there are plenty of places where lugging the tripod in doesn't create such drama.

Are you considering going back down for that day-in-Hocking-Hills photo weekend?