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.