Ricketts Glen State Park’s claim to fame among photographers is it is home to some 22 named waterfalls. And to be perfectly honest I don’t care for most of the images I see from here. And I think part of the reason is that in most of them there is too much water coming over the falls. Until last week I had not been to Ricketts Glen.
Here in southeastern Pennsylvania we have had a hot dry summer.And this has resulted in many creeks to be running a little low. Last week I had the opportunity to spend a morning at the park. And there was not a lot of water–and that is a good thing as far as I’m concerned. Ended up only visiting the 3 falls below Waters Meet.
Arrived at the lower parking lot while it was still dark and started the mile or so walk to the first waterfall in the dark. Using a head lamp, of course. Along the way saw a porcupine hanging on to the side of a tree. It was way too dark to get a picture but it was cool to see it. Seeing my first porcupine in the wild was an added bonus.
I was pleased with a number of compositions that I made. This is one of Harrison Wright Falls.
IMHO, the trick to shooting waterfalls is to find the shutter speed that is just slow enough so that the water starts to blur but not so slow as to turn the water into cotton candy. There are not magic formula to follow as it depends on volume and speed of the water as well a it’s direction relative to the camera. So it’s a matter of trial and error–bracketing shutter speed. But you also need to be mindful of you depth of field so that you can keep foreground and the falls in focus. But here that was not much of an issue since the moving water blurred the submerged rocks in the fg anyway.
The shooting meta data for this image is:
D200 with 12-24 @ 20mm
0.8 sec @ f/5.0 ISO 200
Matrix; Aperture Priority; Ex Comp +1/3
Editor’s Note (8/29/10):
When I was adding keywords to the images from Rickett’s Glen I googled each of the falls to make sure I was putting the correct name on each. When I googled Harrison Wright I got a hit on Joe Rossbach’s Blog with a post of a similar image, from a lower camera position, that must have been made within a day or two of when I was there.