Falling for Tennessee – Part 2

Oh my. Sorry for skipping more Sundays than I planned. I’m sidetracked big time by making jewelry. That and the lack of snow has kept me from the outdoors, but we just got a couple inches so I’m planning to get out in the next few days. In the meantime, here are more shots from my trip.

That isn’t the first photo I took of this location, but it’s a good establishing shot so you know what I was dealing with. While certainly impressive, these falls aren’t easy to shoot. I’m basically in the stream as far back as I can really get. The river turns sharply against a pretty high rock wall and it was deeper than I wanted to deal with and since that was the only place farther back to position, I stayed dry on a boulder instead. It was a little awkward, but toward the end of our time there so the other photographers cleared out of the space between the two falls. To their credit, the organizers moved us in or out of areas together so we would all have a chance to shoot wide and details without getting in each other’s way. Everyone was remarkably good about moving and helping each other and that was nice.

So that’s where a lot of my photos came from – little slices of the water cascading down. After big storms and lots of rain, you can’t get down here at all or you’ll be swept away. Most people stay up on that viewing platform when it’s like that, unless they have a death wish. You can see a few folks up there in that photo which I like for some sense of scale.

We all poked around and took photos of what caught our fancies. The water isn’t deep and so I stayed pretty dry for most of it. Here’s that same log from above at a different angle –

I really liked the thick carpet of moss all over the rock wall. It’s like a miniature vertical jungle.

This is actually the first photo I took here. I really liked the V that the water carved into the limestone. And the water is so clear you can see all the leaves which I thought looked cool, but I’m not sure it translates.

The little mini-falls at the very base of the cliff were fun to play with, too. This one reminded me of steps, maybe leading up to a temple –

I played around with different shutter speeds to get different looks and water texture. Generally, the faster the water, the quicker. Texture and character get lost quickly with long shutter speeds and a lot of fast-moving water. When things are more of a trickle, a longer shutter speed is necessary to get a more calming image, if that’s the thing you’re going for. Compare the shot looking up to the trees to some of the others see what I mean. The one with the trees is handheld at 1/40th of a second, the “temple steps” was on a tripod for 6 seconds.

Moving on. We went to another location on Bobo Creek, but didn’t see any of the waterfalls themselves. The organizers said there wasn’t a safe way down to them, but after coming back and looking online, other people have done it. Maybe not safely though and we had some folks with some mobility issues. Still, I’d have liked to try. I’d also liked to have spent a lot more time here, but dammit, I was rushed off and I wasn’t the only one mad about it.

Can you blame me? I wandered back up the stream a bit and fooled around with different compositions, but I never got the time to settle in and really play.

A shame really because streams like this are my catnip and there was a lot of possibility. Looking back I should have asked one of the guys if we could split up. There are three vehicles and so I think those of us who didn’t need lunch at that very moment could have stayed behind for a little while to really get the most out of this location. But I didn’t think of it and neither did anyone else. Bummer.

After lunch, we headed to another cascade and everyone was ambling down there except me. I stayed for this –

I was the only one who noticed that cloud deck and how it was breaking up just a bit to light up the field and the barn. When I wasn’t going with everyone else, one of the leaders kind of looked at me and I just pointed to the sky. Then he got it and started to call to folks that they might want to get this shot now because of the light. Duh. I know they have a schedule, but when you get conditions like this, you need to take advantage and to hell with the schedule. A few other folks got a similar shot, but they wouldn’t have unless I stopped for it. Yeah, I’m blowing my own horn a bit here, but I’ve been doing this a long time and it’s second nature for me to scope and stay alert for changing conditions. Plus it’s a damn cool barn.

The cascade itself was a bit uninspiring and with the difficult light, I didn’t get all that much out of it. At a different time, it might have worked better. Mostly it was the blank sky that worked against us. This is a composition that works ok –

There’s more falls, but the flow was much thinner and the sky too blank to try for a pano or really wide shot. So mores slices! This little plant caught my eye and it felt more precarious than it does here. With a lot more water I think it would come across better.