Blue Ridge Waterfalls and Mushrooms

Frank

6 years ago

Blue Ridge Waterfalls and Mushrooms

How do these two fit together you ask? Well…… I was in the Blue Ridge Mountains for a nature photography event at Grandfather Mountain. I included leaving a day early and staying an extra day after the event so I could visit some of the area waterfalls. It was the heaviest recorded May rainfall in the Blue Ridge Mountains, so I knew it would make for great water on any of the many Blue Ridge Waterfalls I could visit. As it turned out, it also created great conditions for mushroom production along the trails to get to the waterfalls.

I consider this part of the trip a practice session, as I’m constantly learning more about photography, especially trying to learn good composition and proper exposure for waterfall pictures. In almost every one of my pictures I take now, and review later on, I see things I should/could have done different or better. Some of the things I need to experiment with are my shutter speeds, the use of a polarizer to remove water reflections, and better compositions. It’s all a product of learning from seminars, classes and other things that provide input to encourage me want to constantly improve my stuff.

Anyway, here are some pictures. The picture above is a selfie at Duggers Falls, which is only a few yards from the Linville Falls Visitor Center parking lot.

Widows Creek Falls at Stone Mountain

I purposely chose waterfalls with easy and short trail access. These falls were on one side of the park road and the Roaring River was on the other side. Nice.

Click on the thumbnail for the large pic.

Crab Orchard Falls near Valle Crucis

Good news: The trail is only about a half mile long. Now the get-some-exercise news: It climbs 325 feet of elevation in that 1/2 mile.

I’ll start with two pics from the same setup. First is an HDR combining 3 exposures, the second is a single shot with a slower shutter speed to give a little more detail in the water. Not sure which I like best. And I added one more pic with a different perspective.

Waterfall Park in Newland

The parking lot is 50 feet off of the road, and you walk another 50 feet over to the waterfall. What can I say.

Linville Falls

I decided to take the hike down into Linville Falls Chimney View and the Plunge Basin. It involved a couple of miles hike each way. It was worth it, but this old man paid the price climbing back out of there. (I need to do better at staying in shape.) It was a really bright sunny day, so the photography conditions were not so good. Here are just a few pics. The best part of the hike was finding a fallen log on the trail that was covered with mushrooms. Those are coming up next.

Mushrooms

A couple to start, then a group from one log. It is not often you get a chance to photograph the underside of a cluster of a whole bunch of mushrooms. These mushrooms were smaller than a dime. People on the trail did look at me a little strangely. I laid sprawled out under a log with my tripod set low, camera aiming up, trying to get a view of the screen so I could get exact focus. Then, I was trying to increment a bunch of focus points using the ribs of the lens as marks to minutely adjust the focus in a series of a dozen shots. If that does not make much sense to you, just know that it is necessary for something called focus stacking. I spent over an hour and a half under that log….. what do you think?

You can click on a pic to see it larger, then scroll through using the arrows at the sides of the picture.