Saturday Hikes: May, Week 2

Last Saturday on my way home from my hike, I stopped at the 7-eleven at the mouth of Big Cottonwood Canyon.  It claims to be the busiest 7-eleven in the world, and I guess I can believe that.  There were certainly a lot of people there when I was.  There was a group of kids that wanted to go hiking to Donut Falls, a popular hike in Big Cottonwood Canyon.  One guy in the store was nice enough to let them know that there is still 10 feet of snow at Donut Falls, so hiking there wasn't really an option in their shorts and flip flops.  But he did tell them about Lisa Falls, an easily accessible, though unmarked, hike a few miles up Little Cottonwood Canyon.  I filed away that little tidbit of information and decided to go there this weekend.

My intent was to get up to the falls early enough that it would still be shaded from the direct sunlight.  I wanted to try out a longer exposure to get a nice blur on the water.  It's one of my favorite photo effects, but with my camera, it's a hard one to do.  The key is to let in as little light as possible (small aperture, low ISO) so that the image isn't completely washed out with the light coming in with the slow shutter speed.  It definitely doesn't work on a fully-lighted waterfall.  Which is what I found.  But luckily, the trail was shaded up until the waterfall, so I tried out that effect on the runoff.  The trail doesn't follow the main stream up, but closer to the falls, there is still some runoff coming down along the trail.  Here's one of my attempts.

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5/11/13
Little Cottonwood Canyon, Utah

There's not a lot of water coming down at this point in the stream, but it was a good practice.  I got the effect I was hoping to get, although it would look much better if there were more water.  Oh well.  The lesson learned here is that with a little bit of water, a faster shutter works a little better.  On some of the other pictures where I tried catching the blur of the water, the water is almost completely invisible because of the longer exposure.  But with a lot of water running this slowly, the effect would be more pronounced with the slower shutter speed.

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5/11/13
below Lisa Falls, Little Cottonwood Canyon, Utah

This is directly below Lisa Falls, in fact, in the top right corner of the picture, you can see the falls running down the rocks.  The water was moving so fast that it was blurred to the naked eye.  The joys of the spring runoff.  If I had realized at the time how close I was to capturing the effect that I wanted in this picture, I would have been even more frustrated at the limitations of my camera.  Here, I was using the smallest aperture and slowest ISO speed that my camera allowed, and I still had to use a pretty fast shutter speed to make the exposure come out okay.  The number one least favorite thing about my camera is how small the aperture range is.  I've felt this way for some time now.  It makes me wish that I had just waited a while longer, saved my money, and purchased a DSLR. *sigh*  And since my camera is only a year old (and I just bought a new dishwasher), it will be a while before that upgrade actually happens.  The good thing is that it forces me to work on other, more basic skills.  So maybe by the time I do upgrade, I'll be able to take good photos right off the bat instead of having to struggle with a completely foreign camera.

An just as a bonus, here is a picture of Lisa Falls itself.  It's a lot taller than it looks, maybe 20 or more feet tall.  I'll probably be visiting again once it's warmer outside and the water isn't so icy cold.