Big Creek, North Carolina

Big Creek is a location in Great Smoky Mountains National Park that consistently produces great photos for me; this past fall was no exception! I sat on a rock to the right of the cascade shown here for quite some time adjusting my tripod, in a futile attempt to avoid having to actually get in the frigid water. My efforts were to no avail, as I realized that the shot I wanted involved me getting very close to the cascade with the wide angle lens. I hadn't anticipated getting into deeper water, so I was only wearing slow-drying khaki shorts. I stood in the waist-deep creek long enough for my lower extremities to turn from stinging pain into a comfortable numbness, at which point the water wasn't nearly as bad!

I've previously shot water scenes only in low light conditions; lately, though, bright-light situations have really provided me some unique images. Here, for example, I really like the asymmetric golden reflection on the cascade, a facet which would have been lost in low-light. It just goes to show that you don't produce many pictures if you're moping around a car or campsite just waiting for the conditions to align with what you want. You make the best of the situation, do some hiking, and sometimes leave with an image that you like, even if you've violated some of the unwritten landscape photography rules! And anyway, the advent of extreme dynamic range sensors, quality graduated ND filters, and (most importantly to me) the ability to manually blend multiple exposures-focus points has smashed a lot of the technical difficulties associated with naturally high-contrast scenes like this.

This image is formed from two different shots; one shot exposed for the foreground (with the cascade in focus), and one shot exposed for the background trees, using a further focus point.
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