Many of my photos are of waterfalls, especially those in Shenandoah National Park. There are quite a variety of them there and they vary in size from small cascades to the towering falls of White Oak Canyon and others. One of my favorite areas to shoot is in Hogcamp Branch mainly because of the large amount of heavy moss covering the rocks. However, there are a lot of other special places in the park to explore.
Keyser Run is one such place that I visited earlier this year (see below) and I made it back just in time to catch the leaves in a real jumble all over the waterfall. It is amazing how different it looks in there with all this color around compared to the more muted greens and grays of the mosses and rocks. Now if I can just squeeze in a trip next winter when the gorge is all locked up in ice and snow.
Little Devil Stairs
I stumbled across this nice little waterfall in Little Devil Stairs in June 2009. This site is easy to get to and its the closest hike and waterfall to the Northern Virginia suburbs. Basically its on the mountain behind the town of Washington. Let me warn you though, once the trail heads up the mountain it gets VERY steep. Also, after you pass this waterfall there really isn’t much to look at so get ready for a lot more steep climb–I wish now that I had headed back down at this point, but if I had then I never would have known not to go back again. I do plan another trip back this fall to shoot the color of the leaves in the water at this site–join me. Hopefully there will be more water by then.
Little Devil Stairs
These shots provided a challenge since I wanted to get both the foreground rocks in as sharp focus as the background. Using hyperfocal distance focusing just didn’t provide the degree of sharpness I wanted, requiring a different technique. So I focused first on the foreground rocks and took a shot. Next, without moving the camera or changing the exposure settings I refocused on the rocks in the waterfall further back in the scene. Back home I combined these two images using PhotoShop giving me a scene with everything in sharp focus that captures all the details of the scene.
