Chittenango Falls State Park

I could not have asked for a better day to make the trip out to Chittenango Falls State Park. Temperatures in the mid 70’s, a few puffy white clouds scattered throughout the sky and a light breeze floating through the park. I wasn’t alone in my desire to visit the beautiful waterfall. I almost was unable to find a parking space. Persistence won out eventually…

Surprisingly, the trails were not as crowded as the parking lot indicated. I believe there were a few group gatherings in the park and showing up around lunch time allowed me to explore relatively uninhibited. I was disappointed to see a family, or two, at the base of the waterfall climbing on the rocks. I guess all the signs prohibiting entrance to the falls went unseen… ???

I let the unwanted subjects for my image bother me for only a few minutes. There was nothing I could do about them and I was fairly confident I could make them disappear in Lightroom when I processed my images. Let me know if you think you know where they were in the image… 🙂

The falls face South and there is not an optimal time to grab an image as the gorge walls will be in shadow most of the day. I thought my best option would be at noon, which most photographers would say is when the light would be the harshest. But, the shadows on the walls help tame the overall appearance of the image. For each of the compositions, I captured a bracket of images in the event I would need to combine a few different exposures. This view didn’t need extra processing. The -.7EV image tamed the highlights well and I was able to pull out the shadows to show the detail in the gorge walls.