Worlds End State Park, Pennsylvania thumbnails only

This small waterfall is found deep in the woods of Worlds End State Park in Pennsylvania. A cloudy day is often preferred for deep woods photography - the lack of direct sunlight avoids the hotspots typically found in similar pictures taken on a sunny day. I was shooting in the rain during some of this hike.

Dutchman Falls are actually located outside of, but not far from, Worlds End State Park. From a parking lot just off of route 220 north of Laporte, the falls are a short hike down a moderately steep trail near the Loyalsock Creek.
 
The falls shown in this picture are not as large as the main Dutchman Falls found just below. But, I liked the layer of rock going through the frame at about 1/3 from the top. And the leaves on the ground added life to the composition. And the falls are beautiful.
 
A circular polarizer filter was used for this capture.

Fall foliage reflects in the still water of "The Haystacks" on the Loyalsock Creek near Worlds End State Park.
 
I have frequently carried split neutral density filters with me, but I rarely find myself using them. Primarily because I seldom shoot scenes with a straight line between the portion of the frame I want to darken and the portion I want to lighten. Also, the amount of difference in exposure needed varies greatly. And, the white balance is often different in the two (or more) sections of the frame.
 
This image is of a typical-for-me scene that needs a portion of the frame darkened.
 
For this image, I shot two frames - one exposed for the background trees and one for the in-the-shade rocks. The exposed-for-shade image was given a warmer white balance and a small saturation boost. In Photoshop, I overlayed the exposed-for-the-sun frame with the exposed-for-the-shade frame, creating two layers. I then used a very soft eraser brush to removed the overexposed portion of the top layer to expose the bottom layer. This technique is very easy - and the results can look great - and natural.
 
Do note that, if you have a subject in the frame that is moving, this technique only works well if that motion is fully contained in one of the two layers. A CP filter was used for this image. I'm still debating between cloning out the floating leaves or leaving them in.

A very early AM alarm followed by a long drive landed me at Canyon Vista, Worlds End State Park before daylight. I was rewarded with dense fog in the valley with only mountain tops showing. I have lots of pictures from this morning (especially as the fog started to burn off), but one of my favorites is shown here. Only the tops of the mountains colored by fall show through the clouds. The bottom of the clouds are still in the shade of the mountain I was shooting from.
 
The memory of being tired went away much faster than the memory of the experience. And the photos will keep that memory going long into the future.

I timed my Dutchman Falls (near Worlds End State Park) photography so that the sun would be completely set at this vantage point - to avoid any hotspots in the frame. Plenty of small streams of water make a wide variety of compositions available at this location.
 
I generally use manual exposures when photographing waterfalls. Set the aperture for the depth of field/sharpness needed, set the ISO to 100 (usually) and set the shutter so that a very small area of the brightest water is overexposed (blinking highlights).

The Canyon Vista Overlook in Worlds End State Park is a great place to start a morning. Fog often fill the valley below. The scene changes by the minute as the sun burns off the fog.

Just because you arrive at a high location before sunrise doesn't mean that you will have a clear view at sunrise – even if the forecast was for a clear or partly cloudy day. Of course, sometimes you prefer for some of the view to be blocked.
 
And the latter was indeed the case this particular morning at Canyon Vista in Worlds End State Park when heavy fog filled the valley long after sunrise. I had plenty of time to explore a wide variety of shots including this one where I used a large hemlock tree's branches to add interest to the plain blue sky.

Dry Run Falls are located in sight of Dry Run Road near Hillsgrove, PA. If you can get across the stream (it was low on this day), there are some nice ledges to incorporate into your images.

After waiting out a rain storm in the parking lot, I was greeted with this fall view of Canyon Vista in Worlds End State Park. I worked with the 50mm compositions available to me and took home may variations with fast-changing clouds making even similar compositions quite different from each other. After struggling to determine which was my favorite, I decided to combine two images to make this one. Problem solved.

As far as I know, this falls remains un-named. So, I dug deep into my creativity and named it Upper Dutchman Falls, since it is located just above Dutchman Falls.
 
Upper Dutchman Falls is not nearly as high as the bigger falls just below it, but I find it to be at least as asthetically pleasing.
 
With an ultra-wide angle focal length, move in close to make the falls appear large relative to the more distant objects in the frame.

Shooting deep forest scenes can be very challenging - especially on clear days such as this one. I found this still-green beach tree over a bed of ferns that had succombed to fall pleasing to my eye. I framed the beach tree about 1/3 of the way into the frame and moved forward/backward to get the perspective I wanted. I then adjusted focal length for the framing desired. A B+W XS-PRO CP Filter was used for this shot.

Bright green ferns glow in the sun against a deep shade background only the road in Worlds End State Park near Forksville, PA . This is another example of a capture I made by simply stopping the car and grabbing the Canon PowerShot G1 X that was beside me.

The dynamic range in this Watchman Falls composition was extreme. A manual HDR composite technique was required to achive this result.

A small waterfall flows into a cold, clear pool. Photography can be especially time consuming when exposures take 25 seconds and the long exposure noise reduction takes another 25 seconds.