Hello and welcome to my blog. This will be a place where I document my adventure as I proceed into this gap year of mine. From sharing my aims, aspirations and goals to describing the places I travel, the photos taken and memories made. For now, their will not be a precise structure to these posts just the mere ramblings of my mind and my adventures of the past week.
This past week I began my gap year in earnest. Bringing back a little schedule in my life from the good, but somewhat chaotic disorder of the past summer, was relaxing. Instead of sleeping in to whenever I now start my day earlier, often with a cup of hot tea reading Don Quixote, a classic that I can whole heartedly recommend. To help fill, my time I am taking some online classes not for credit. During which i’ve been learning aspects of photography and composition, a course in ‘mathematical thinking’ (mostly about proofs so far), and most interestingly tearing out my hair as I attempt to learn music theory – all great worthwhile experiences. In all seriousness though, taking these classes especially ones more foreign like the music theory class is rewarding. While I can read music, play the bass, and the harmonica to a lesser extent, my knowledge of theory is almost nothing. Despite theory is not needed to play any instrument that does not mean it should be neglected. Not only does it explain things taken for granted, exploring fields related and even those seemingly unrelated is where great discoveries are made and masterpieces produced. This reality applies to any field, from music to biology. Knowledge on the grand scheme is unified, any divisions made between ‘fields’ are artificial and so it is natural that exploring multiple fields and not hyper-specializing as our society likes to do, is worthwhile. This is the idea behind the liberal arts. Philosophical musings aside, waterfalls! (I could not think of a better segway)
On Tuesday, I did the other great part of my gap year: going places. I did the Rose River Loop also adding the little distance to visit Dark Hollow Falls. For this trip, besides just getting outside and taking photos I wanted to shoot water with longer exposures to get the flowing water look that im sure all of us have seen. In addition, in the past couple weeks I’ve done some reading on timelapse photography so I wanted to try that out too. For this and the long exposures on the waterfalls, I strapped my tripod to my already over packed backpack so I could enjoy lugging around more weight!
That day I woke up, grabbed my bag, had some hot tea and then took quite bit of time hit the road, but hey no reason to be in a rush. This was the first time i’ve driven to Shenandoah by myself and all went well which could not be assumed based on the tendency of people somehow getting lost driving to water fall hikes in Shenandoah. When I arrived at the trail head it was a crisp 53, fall is definitely in the air, and the past weather being humid 80s it felt wonderful even if on a usually I’d be cold. I started the trail going downhill to Rose River, a nice forest path which like most are ever so relaxing, and their I found some nice fungi and moss growing on a tree which I decided to photograph. While their is nothing ‘special’ about it I feel like it captures the whole aesthetic of these forest paths.
The path eventually decided and start to follow Rose River, either a small river or a large creek it had many mini-cascades as it rushed downhill. As I followed the path I came across quite a large orange spider hanging that I almost walked face first into. Disadvantage of being tall, we are the ones that clear the spider webs for everyone else. Anyway, I snapped some photos of him and I kept on progressing. Quickly, I made it to the falls in Rose River where I climbed down into a gorge where the water splashed to a pool. Their I grabbed my tripod and set up my camera. When taking long exposure shots, in this case my shutter speed was set to half a second, a tripod is basically a necessity as it is impossible to handhold steady enough. To compensate for the extra light that the camera receives either polarizing filters and/or nd filters can be used, or as I did, just lowering the iso to the lowest setting as long with setting your aperture to its narrowest setting can achieve great results. I then set a short timer on my camera and here was the result.
Now comes the fun, it was all fun, but I guess cooler part, the timelapse. Video at its heart is just a series of photographs played in a progression. The same is true of timelapses except added to the mix is the distortion of time. While there are many ways to achieve the result whether by taking a video and speeding it up or using a cameras timelapse mode, in most cases the best results can achieved using an intervalometer. Most cameras have these built in. Despite the complexity of the word intervalometer, all they do is automatically take a photo every X seconds. So thats what I did, using the exact same settings on my camera to capture my first still of the waterfall I set my camera to automatically take a photo every 2 seconds which I would later sequence into this short video.
After letting my camera do its thing for five or so minutes I decided to pack up and continue on my way. Past this the meandering trail began its upward journey as it came to a new creek and began to follow it upstream. During this time stopped multiple times to get the smaller cascades on the creek and took some random photos of the path and couple stones that were stacked in an aestheticly pleasing manner. For the most part a nice uneventful hike with the lovely sounds of rushing water falls and the distant sounds of birdsong. I eventually made it to where the paths met up to the fire road that concludes the final part of the loop. However, before returning I decided to take the path up the short distance up to where Dark Hollow Falls is. For pretty much every part of that little trail the creek had lovely waterfalls that could probably could be mistaken for the main falls. At last, I reached the actual falls. Thankfully it wasn’t too busy as other wise I might have not been able to get as close to the falls to take photos. Their I set up with my tripod in much as similar fashion as in Rose River and I took my photos. Scroll up to the top heading photo to see the result. Next I proceed to make a timelapse of Dark Hollow akin to the one I made at Rose River. However here I came into some difficulties I could not so easily resolve. The spot that I picked, water kept on splashing onto the lens and for a time lapse I could not just wipe it off as I did before taking my initial photo. In the end, I decided to just finish up and have a timelapse with water drops on the lens as more people were coming and I didn’t want to be in their way, needless, the resulting timelapse is still cool. After packing all my items up I retraced back to the Rose River loop and got walking back to the car.
An enjoyable beginning and hopefully much to come. Well that mostly concludes all I have to say, i’m not sure entirely what I will write about in the future weeks so if you have any suggestions or comments please tell me. Thanks for reading.