White Noise

Oneida Falls, Ricketts Glen SP, Pennsylvania.
An intermittently wet hike on the Ricketts Glen loop had turned afternoon into dusk. It was growing cold enough that I had all my layers on under my rain shell, and I was more inclined to catch up to my brother and get back to the campsite, but each elevation rise or turn in the trail brought on another fall. By the time I found a vantage point and set up, the loss of light was demanding 10 seconds of exposure, even at an ISO of 800, and even then the LCD fooled me--the images were still dark in RAW conversion.
It took more processing than I thought it would to get something out of this,and sort of became a project to experiment with some of these tools we have in our software bags these days. I processed two dark images as HDR to brighten it, then brightened just a bit more in Lightroom along with supressing some of the color enhancement from HDR. The creaminess of the water imparted by the long exposure seemed to call for a softer feel to everything,so I modified it a bit more with NIK Color Efex Pro 4--a subdued Glamour Glow coupled with a graduated fog filter, neither of which I've ever tried. After this processed I still thought it had too much color and toned down a couple of the hues. In the dark, the white noise of the water seems to intensify, no doubt the sense of hearing increasing as vision decreases. It is both spooky and comforting at once. I put on my headlamp layer and and trudged up the trail. Perhaps what I made is a bit brighter and softer than what I saw, but better expresses the feeling of the moment.

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Filename: White Noise, Oneida Falls, Ricketts Glen
Image Size: 2048x1359 / 3.2MB; Autumn Ganoga Glen HDR Kitchen Creek Oneida Falls Pennsylvania Ricketts Glen creek falls landscape landscape photography nature waterfall waterfalls
Contained in galleries: East/Northeast

Oneida Falls, Ricketts Glen SP, Pennsylvania.<br />
An intermittently wet hike on the Ricketts Glen loop had turned afternoon into dusk. It was growing cold enough that I had all my layers on under my rain shell, and I was more inclined to catch up to my brother and get back to the campsite, but each elevation rise or turn in the trail brought on another fall. By the time I found a vantage point and set up, the loss of light was demanding 10 seconds of exposure, even at an ISO of 800, and even then the LCD fooled me--the images were still dark in RAW conversion. <br />
It took more processing than I thought it would to get something out of this,and sort of became a project to experiment with some of these tools we have in our software bags these days. I processed two dark images as HDR to brighten it, then brightened just a bit more in Lightroom along with supressing some of the color enhancement from HDR. The creaminess of the water imparted by the long exposure seemed to call for a softer feel to everything,so I modified it a bit more with NIK Color Efex Pro 4--a subdued Glamour Glow coupled with a graduated fog filter, neither of which I've ever tried. After this processed I still thought it had too much color and toned down a couple of the hues. In the dark, the white noise of the water seems to intensify, no doubt the sense of hearing increasing as vision decreases. It is both spooky and comforting at once. I put on my headlamp layer and and trudged up the trail. Perhaps what I made is a bit brighter and softer than what I saw, but better expresses the feeling of the moment.