No real good reason for the title of this post, except for this.
Saturday didn’t promise to provide optimum conditions for waterfall photography, but I went out anyway. I had not given Schoolhouse Falls serious consideration, despite its being relatively close to my house, because Time Ernst’s description in his waterfall book is not exactly glowing. That was a mistake.
The hike in is vertical but short and the Schoolhouse Hollow has a beautiful creek in the bottom with lots of interesting geology and topography. The light was pretty bright and contrasty and it hadn’t rained in a few days, which had me expecting just a hike and very little photography. Once I got down to the creek I found more water than I expected and thin layer of clouds taking some of the edge off the harsh light.
Schoolhouse turned out to be one of the most photogenic waterfalls I’ve ever seen. It has a decent look to the pattern of the water and it isn’t shrouded in trees. A nice-size ledge runs around behind the fall so it’s possible to get several different perspectives. A lot of our waterfalls have only one or two decent angles to shoot because of trees or topography. Schoolhouse offers practically 360 degrees of shooting locations, plus that ledge provides additional options. I was shooting at f/22 and the very lowest ISO setting on my camera, both of which are rumored to impact image quality. Additionally, I was using my new cheapo Rokinon 14mm lens, which can’t be used with filters. So no ND or polarizer filters to tame the light levels. The upshot of all this is that I could barely muster a slow enough shutter speed to blur the water. I knew I would probably have to do some HDR processing so I shot brackets of everything. These first and third photos are HDR efforts. I’m not the best HDR artist in the world, but I used HDR Efex Pro 2 and I think they came out all right. I’m definitely going to hit this waterfall again when we get some wet and cloudy conditions.
A neato slot in the rock ledge upstream feeds this little fall. The fall itself is only 4 feet tall but I was struck by the look of the plunge pool.
This map shows all the waterfalls in the latest Tim Ernst waterfalls book. Click a marker and pop-up will appear with the waterfall’s stats. This is a fairly primitive Web app and it won’t do some things it really should, like label the waterfall markers. I’ll keep working on it.