It’s always wonderful when the first warm days arrive, along with some early splashes of color in the yard - usually the snow crocuses when they first pop up. This year, there were some very early days with temperatures in the seventies up here in the north east. My step daughter was home from college for an extended Easter weekend, and we had the opportunity to go for a hike in Ricketts Glen State Park (Pennsylvania). The weather promised to be wonderfully warm, and the recent rains and the spring thaw promised to have more than average amounts of water rushing over the falls at the glen. Ricketts Glen has quite a few hiking trails, one of which goes along a stream with many waterfalls and cascades along the hike. The hike along the falls is around 5 miles in length, a hike I would consider moderate in length and difficulty.
With some hope I brought along my 105 AF-D Micro lens for some close up photography. It was early enough (April 2), that I really wasn’t sure there would be any flowers yet, but to my surprise, I was able to capture the image below. Image was taken with my Nikon D300 an the 105 mm micro lens.
Early Flowers
The falls did indeed have much more water than at my last visit. I took a number of photographs, none of which I was overly pleased with, but, the images still look SORT OF nice at web size. As I often do when photographing waterfalls, I bracketed most of my shots by taking three images at different exposures and made another attempt at a high dynamic range image. The image below is not good enough quality to print, but is one more failed attempt at an HDR image - it would probably print o.k. at 8 in x 10 in size, but not much more. Still, this gives the idea of what I saw. The image was taken with the 18-200 VR lens and my Nikon D300. The HDR processing was don in Photomatix.
Ricketts Glen
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