March 7, 2013

Twenty-two named waterfalls in Ricketts Glen State Park…and 80% of the images I post here on my website, as well as my Flickr site, are of Oneida Falls.  It’s my favorite waterfall in the Park.  By far it’s not the biggest…or tallest.  It doesn’t have a crazy cascade that sends white water in all directions.  There’s no real roar when you’re standing next to her.  It’s pretty unassuming.  Maybe…that’s what draws me in.   

January 10, 2013

Taken this past autumn with my Holga 120N medium format film camera.

Ricketts Glen State Park
Autumn 2012

My favorite image from a recent trip up to Ricketts Glen State Park.

3am comes pretty quickly when you don’t hit the sack until midnight.  But with the call for fog and rain in Luzerne County, I made the late decision to head up to Ricketts Glen State Park to shoot the always pleasing combination of waterfalls and fall foliage.  Leaving at 3:30 put me at the park by 6:00. which gave me an hour to hike in the dark to reach the first of the waterfalls before the 7:00 sunrise.

Unlike many places this year, the glen was full of water and the falls were really crashing.  All seasons are unique and hold their own magic at Ricketts, but autumn is pretty hard to beat.

A combination of wind, rain, darkness, and smeared lens lent themselves to complete this moody shot of one of my favorite waterfalls within Ricketts Glen State Park…Oneida Falls.

I had the great fortune of spending a photography-packed, overnight trip upstate last week with one of my photobuds.

The reason for the last minute decision to head up wasn’t to shoot the waterfalls, but rather, the celestial heavens.  Our part of North America was expecting a K6 Aurora, which was to be seen as far south as Washington DC.  We aren’t afforded prime visibility shooting the night sky here in Chester County.  The light pollution from the suburban sprawl really cancels out any decent stargazing.  Unless you’ve seen the night sky in places like Colorado, the Adirondaks, or Maine (which were all nothing less than jaw-dropping) you really wouldn’t realize just what you’re missing.  I would highly suggest the next time you visit one of these locations to set your alarm for one or two o’clock in the morning and check out the night sky.  The mountainous area of upstate Pennsylvania does afford you a really nice, unpolluted, view of the stars.  Soooo…thankfully my friend Beth called me to come up to do a little shooting.  I really needed that little ‘push’ to get back out and start shooting again. 

Anyway…the bad news is…there was no aurora!  Beth and I shot along a really large  lake with unobstructed northern views from a little after 9 pm until 2:30 am.  Other than the ‘no-show’ of the light show, we had a great time shooting star trails and the Milky Way.  We also witnessed quite a few meteors burning their way across the atmosphere…which is always cool.  I’ll see if I can find one of those to post sometime in the near future. 

Which…brings us to this shot I’ve posted today.  Harrsion Wright is probably my favorite waterfall inside of Ricketts Glen.  It’s twenty-seven foot drop is thunderous echoing off of what appears (to me) like a red stone amphitheatre.  I’ve shot this particular falls a million times and it gets difficult to bring something home that’s a bit different.  Instead of shooting it from up close and emphasizing just the falls, I decided to wade out into the water and shoot it from downstream a bit.  I’m happy I did.  I think this is probably my favorite shot I’ve taken of it so far, and one of my top two or three I’ve taken from inside of Ricketts Glen as a whole.  For as little time as we spent doing any waterfall shooting, it was much more productive than the night shooting I originally went up there for.

I haven’t posted lately, life seems to be getting in the way of my photography…I hate when that happens.  On the occasion that it isn’t getting in the way of my photography, it severely interferes with it.

I was contacted by a Flickr friend, who lives in Connecticut, that he was heading to Ricketts and asked if I would like to join him.  The prospect of getting away for a day or two…cheaply…sounded like a perfect fit.  The conditions were to be ideal, overcast and rainy.  Little did I know just how ideal the conditions were going to be.  From a couple days before the trip, and up to the day I left for home, the region received just under a foot of rain.  Couple all of that rain along with the spring thaw and you’ve got yourself one hell of a lot of water on your hands.  Too much water.

As an avid waterfall seeker and shooter, you pray for heavy water flow and rainy days.  That combination is as pleasing to a photographer as chocolate and peanut butter…it just doesn’t get any better.  The waterfalls were rippin’…they were nothing less than thunderous.  Unfortunately, because of all of that water, the falls had lost their individual characteristics.  Each of the 22 waterfalls are unique in how the water travels over them and that uniqueness was lost under the conditions we faced.  Other than their different heights, all of the falls looked (pretty much) the same….with foamy white-water stretching out between them on the seven mile falls trail.

Nonetheless, it was quite thrilling to see the water blasting through the canyon so fiercely….you could feel it thundering in your chest.   It was quite exhilarating.  For me, it just wasn’t very photogenic.  No big loss…it’s more about being there, than the pictures…at times.

Waterfall Oneida after a day of heavy rains. One of twenty-two named waterfalls located inside of the Ricketts Glen State Park, Benton Pennsylvania.