Visual Journey: Uvas Canyon County Park

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I created this blog three years ago, and this is my third posting of photos from Uvas Canyon County Park. I'm sure it will not be my last. This park, only 12 miles from my house, is a local treasure. Nine photographers from the club met Sunday morning to hike the Waterfall trail and take a few pictures. Swanson Creek runs all year, but without rain, it is only a trickle. After a storm, the water surges, tumbling through the canyon and swirling over rocks. Our timing was perfect.

The waterfalls are not huge (like Yosemite), but they have a certain photographic charm. On this outing, I concentrated on the more intimate details of water & flora, zooming in on interesting combinations. This is one of my favorites, inspired by several of Gary Hart's photographs. It has some flaws, but my overall goal of flora against a blurred background that hints at the context of the scene was achieved.

This is another attempt at the same concept, but the background was so cluttered and busy that the water in the creek hardly showed at all. I turned this unprocessed image into...

... this by over-darkening the background and saturating the green.

Another lesson I learned form Gary is to "work a scene:" bracket the composition (not the exposure) by changing angles, and zooming in or out. This next set of photographs illustrates the concept. The first, a rather bland portrait of side by side waterfalls, shows the whole scene. I moved off to the side and took some angled shots, but didn't see much improvement.

Remembering what Gary said, I began looking for smaller compositions within the scene, like that fern growing out of the rock. What if I zoomed in to emphasize it? That's when I really started to have some fun. I ended up with 10 good photographs (meaning I liked them) from "working" this one scene. Thanks Gary.

Sometimes a photographer lucks out by being set up in just the right place when sunlight breaks through that creates a rainbow in the fall of water. Or maybe the photographer held a diffraction filter in front of the lens.