The Wandering Photographer

Ohio's Cedar Falls in Hocking Hills State Park

You may remember my post about Upper Falls at Old Man's Cave in Hocking Hills State Park. Well, Upper Falls is only one of a number of falls in the park. Today I want to highlight Cedar Falls.

Cedar falls is probably the most photographed falls in the park. Therefore it can difficult to get a unique view, but any view will be wonderful.

Waterfalls are often best shot on cloudy days. The contrast and colors are often better and it is easier to use slow shutter speeds to get that great silky look to the water.

I didn't have one this day but it is helpful to have a neutral density filter in order to lengthen the exposure even more. Most of these were shot at around 1/5 to 1/2 second. Two seconds or more would be even better. You can get some silkiness even at 1/20 to 1/30 second.

Views of the entire falls are important and lovely but make sure you zoom in and get detail shots. They often turn out to be the best of the day.

Of course you have to realize that you aren't going to be the only people taking shots. This couple was having as great a time as I was. I'm sure they got some shots they can be proud of.

Hocking Hills State Park is located near Logan, Ohio. Logan is located on US 33 about an hour Southeast of Columbus between Lancaster and Athens, Ohio. A visit to Ohio University in Athens is well worth the side trip.

Keep on shootin'!!!

Thanks to Debbie at Delicious Baby for facilitating Photo Friday.

© 2009 Tim Marks all rights reserved

Small Boat Cruise to Alaska

Back in 2000 when we decided to head to Alaska on vacation we decided that we wanted to spit our time between a cruise and a land portion.  (You can see pix from part of the land portion here.)  We began looking at “small ship” cruise lines as we didn’t want to be lost amongst thousands of other travelers.  A number of companies with 70 – 100 passenger ships looked interesting and I was about to call one of them when I came across the web site for Discovery Voyages. 

Dean Rand captains the MV Discovery on 5 and 6 day cruises in Prince William Sound.  The MV discovery has a passenger capacity of 12, that’s right I said 12.  The six cabins on the 65 foot boat are small but the cruise and the experience of Prince William Sound are well worth it.  The food is wonderful and the scenery is breathtaking.  It is admittedly a cruise for people who like people.

Each day we would take the zodiacs ashore and explore the wild surroundings of the sound.  From Icebergs to waterfalls we explored them all.

The view from the deck of the boat was magnificent and the view from land was often even better.  Wildlife that we saw included humpback whales, orcas, sea otters and black bears, all seen right from the deck of the boat.  The orcas were so close my moderate telephoto lens was too long to capture the large mammal's face.

If you want a real adventure consider a cruise on a small boat, a really small boat!  It is the best way to see Alaska.

© Tim Marks all rights reserved

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