Just some more water

 

Well things were pretty quiet this week. Lots of running around and doing stuff without a lot of time to put towards photography.

I went for one quick walk along a gully that I have been visiting for years. Although there is much that is familiar, there is always something new. The stream rises and falls with the weather, trees rise and fall too, the course of the water changes as erosion wears away some barriers and forms new ones as the stones split and shift.

The water falls that are formed from fallen trees subtly change as they slowly decay. Small ones can be swept away in the rush of one spring storm while larger ones can last for several years. The water here has a lot of iron in it so the wood often takes on an orange or red color that shifts as the seasons pass and the layers of wood shed into the water.

It is still early in the Spring for us, but it has been pretty warm already. The stones that during the winter are clean and mostly blue-grey are already starting to turn slippery with growing slime that is sometimes brown and sometimes black. Green moss is starting to build along the edges of the flowing water.

The air is warm enough now that I can take off my boots and socks and wade into the water if I need to in order to get a shot from a particular angle. The water doesn’t ever get what I would call warm even in the summer, but now it still has that springtime icy snap to it so I work until my feet get numb and then struggle out to warm up in the sunshine.

MDW

An Early Adirondack Trip

 

This past week I took a little trip to the Adirondack mountains. The mountains are around four hours drive from where I live (plus or minus depending on where you want to go) so I don’t get there too often. I make it a couple three times a year. I like going early before the bugs, the hot weather, and the crowds set in, but usually not this early. For one reason or another this was the time I had available to go, so I did.

Anyhoo, I headed up to Indian Lake (the town not the lake) and got there around two in the afternoon. My wife had lined me up with a two nights stay at the 1870 Bed and Breakfast. Proprieter Bill Zullo is following in the footsteps of his grandmother who started taking in guests in the 1960’s.

If you are looking for a homey, quiet, and comfortable place to stay in the heart of the Adirondacks, this is the place to be. Besides the accommodations, Bill (being a local) has a wealth of knowledge about the area past and present.

After meeting Bill and dropping of some stuff in my room, I headed out to do recon for the next day’s hiking. I drove south along Indian Lake (the lake not the town). Even though the weather has been warn the last couple of weeks, this is the Adirondacks and the snow doesn’t go away that quickly. In open areas it is gone, but back in the woods there is still two or three feet on the ground. I maybe should have brought my snowshoes, but I figured I would mostly try to stick to streams flowing with spring runoff.

At the south end of the lake just above Lewey Lake I found a parking area near a likely looking stream. Turns out there are several picnic areas here not far off the road except that the picnic tables are barely visible as they are just peeking out of the snow as if they are growing from spring bulbs like tulips.

Walking in the snow is a problem. I could walk on the surface most of the time, but every once in a while I would “posthole”. The crust on top would give way and my foot would suddenly drop down in a hole until I was sitting on my butt in the snow with one leg above and one leg below. Crawling out of these situations gets old real quick. My best bet was to travel in the stream itself from rock to rock where I could and just slogging through the water otherwise.

My map calls this stream Falls Brook and indeed there are some nice little falls here. I spent some time taking photos, but I didn’t go too far upstream as I planned to come back tomorrow morning. Instead I headed down to Piesco Lake to try and find trail to the big waterfall that I had heard about through the Internet.

Just as an aside – I have always pronounced Piesco like pies – co as in multiples of fruit filled confections with a co on the end. Bill told me that it should be pronounced pi – sec – o with a short i, short e, and long o. When I got home I did a little web search on this and could only find one place were anyone attempted to show the correct pronunciation and they showed it as pi – see – co with a short i, long e, and long o. Seeing as Bill lives around these parts and his grandfather was an Adirondack guide and all, I’ll have to side with his pronunciation on this one.

The Northville-Placid trail passes through Piesco Lake (the town not the lake). I got onto it out by Piesco airport off Haskells Road. The snow of course was way deep, but I found that I could move along pretty good if I stayed on the narrow band in the middle of the trail where X-country skiers had packed it down. I was looking for a side trail that headed to T Lake and the waterfall in question. I didn’t find it. I get the idea that it is not an “official” trail and with all the snow, I wasn’t surprised that I didn’t see it. I’ll look for it some other time. I walked a couple of miles into the woods just for fun and then headed back when I got tired of falling off the ridge when I wasn’t looking at my feet.

One thing to remember when you go to the mountains off season is that a lot of businesses are closed. So you may need to go a ways and plan ahead to find something like an open restaurant for supper. Never one to plan too much, I opted for junk food from a Gas and Gulp that I passed.

The next morning I left early. I was out of there before sunrise. Bill and I had not made any firm plans about breakfast and I figured he didn’t need to be getting up that early just to feed me so I skipped the breakfast part of the Bed and Breakfast deal. It turns out that he was actually up earlier than I was, but figured he didn’t want to wake me up if I was one of those tourist slugs that sleeps in all the time. Oh well.

I got to the parking area for Falls Brook in time to watch the sun rise over Indian Lake (the lake this time). Not quite as spectacular as it would be later in the year – the trees on the mountains are still bare and most of the lake, except around the edges, remains ice covered, but still pretty neat. After that I walked up the stream taking pics as I went. Early on most of the water was evenly shadowed which is usually good for water photography. As the day went on the clear sunny skies made exposures tricky, but far more interesting to my mind. I wandered along the stream in no particular hurry. I came back to the car sometime after noon.

I wasn’t sure where to go next. I drove around a while looking for other likely looking spots and some lunch. Finally I decided to go over to Cedar River Road and take it toward Wakely Dam. The road follows the Cedar River of course. Usually it goes all the way to Wakely Dam, but during the winter the road is closed part way down and is only open to snowmobiles. I stopped at the parking area and walked down the road toward the dam.

The road was mostly mud with an inch or two of snow in some parts. No one else was around so I had the place to myself. According to a sign nailed to a tree, the dam is about 4 miles from the parking area. It wasn’t a real eventful walk (I did see some grouse and some deer) and I didn’t take many photos, but it was a beautiful sunny afternoon at about 50F – just me and the trees and plenty of time for reflection. I didn’t go all the way to the dam. I decided to turn around at Wakely pond. The sun was just dropping behind the mountains when I got back.

MDW

Your Friend the Histogram

For a guy that likes to photograph flowing water, this is the time of the year to be out in the woods. The melting snow and the spring rains send water blasting down ravines and fills gorges from wall to wall. The speed, the deafening roar, the gusts of spray pelting your face; it engulfs and invigorates.

I wish I could be out everyday. Doomed by the speed that creates it, all too soon it will wash itself away and the slower quieter rhythm of summer will ease in behind it. I’ll be left looking forward to next year. Until then I shoot whenever I can.

Oddly enough this brings me around to the subject of histograms. For water shots the histogram is your best friend. I love this feature of digital photography. See the problem is that the water is bright white and shiny (especially when the sun is out). On the other hand the stones, the plants, the trees, all the background stuff, is dark sometimes even black.

The difference between the dark and the light elements is too great for the average digital sensor or roll of film to handle. Most often either the white water gets “blown out” to a blank white hole and loses all detail or the dark background becomes just a blank black hole. The trick is to play the light - shoot at the right moment, from the right angle, and especially at the right exposure to create a balance between the opposing forces.

There are a couple of technical ways to fix this problem by avoiding it all together. There are digital cameras with much wider exposure latitude than the Nikon D200 that I use. They can handle a broader range of dark to light without losing detail at either end. Of course you have to pay for this kind of thing. I really can’t afford anything like that.

A cheaper solution is to use high dynamic range (HDR) software. The idea here is to shoot a scene several times at different exposures from really dark to really light. The software takes all the images, extracts the correctly exposed details from each one, and melds them into a single evenly balanced image. I haven’t played with HDR much yet – I’d like to, but I just haven’t had the time. One obvious drawback is that you need to be shooting things that don’t move between shots.

So for now let’s say that we are stuck with x number of stops of exposure latitude in our camera and our scene has x plus stops of exposure.

With a film camera the traditional solution is to bracket. Take multiple shots at various exposures and then pick whatever one looks the best after development. Burning costly film and development services when you know you will be tossing most of the images is a bit of a wrench. You are working blind here too. What if you take three shots and find out later that none of them are the right exposure? Experience and shooting more shots for a wider range can help ensure that one of them is right, but it isn’t always foolproof. What about when you are shooting on a partly cloudy day and the sun is in and out of the clouds between shots or maybe even during a shot if the exposure time is a long one? Hard to meter that one.

This is where the histogram comes to the rescue. My typical M.O. is to meter up each scene (I just use the in camera meter) and take an educated guess at the exposure. I take a pic and then immediately view the histogram on the camera’s preview screen. If the graph goes off the right end of the scale, I know that I have blown out the highlight detail. If it goes off the left end, I know that I have lost shadow detail. Next I take a series of shots (I never use any of the camera’s automatic features) adjusting the aperture, ISO, and shutter speed to balance the histogram as best I can.

I don’t rely on how the image “looks” on the preview screen. The preview screen is nice, but the ambient lighting is too variable, the screen is too small, and the in camera conversion from raw sensor data to the display is too crude to make serious exposure judgements.

Typically the goal is to push the graph as far to the right without going off the end. This makes the bright areas as bright as possible without losing detail. This also pulls the dark left end along as far as possible so that as little as possible is lost in the shadows.

This is the typical way to go and there is a school of thought that says you should in fact shoot every digital image as far to the right of the histogram as you can even if the image seems too bright overall. The idea being that this way you record as much digital info as possible and you can turn the final exposure down later in software during processing.

Having a science type educational background I can see the logic in this. It probably is the way to go. Unfortunately when I’m shooting photos I’m using the other side of my brain. What the image looks like in the immediate now while the scene is all around me is when I want to do my “work”. Hours or days later in my office far removed from the action is not the best time for me personally to try and pull something inspired out of cold logically produced sensor data.

I don’t push every image to the right edge. I tend to like more black in my images that most people so sometimes I purposely let things drop off the left edge.  I also have found that even when pushing the highlights I like to leave just a bit of room on the right side. I do this so that I can tweak things like brightness and contrast. If the graph is hard up against the edge, sometimes adding contrast and always adding brightness will push it over. On rare occasions I will even take an image over the right edge on purpose to flare some areas (a la the stick in the flowing water image shown here).

So my summary would be don’t rely on the preview screen to eyeball your exposures. Use the histogram all the time. Use it to set boundaries within which you can play with the light. On the other hand, once you get the hang of it, feel free to break the boundaries once in a while.

MDW