After photographing the base of Fall Creek Falls, I headed back to the cabin. After giving myself some time to rest (the hike back up the base trail was quite tiring), we all loaded up and checked out a few other areas and hiked a few other short trails. While we were out, I noticed a towering wall of rocks overlooking a small picnic area on the banks of Cane Creek and made a mental note to go back to it the next day.
The next day, we all hopped back into the car and made our way to the picnic area. When we arrived at the location, we got out and began walking around. My dog, with my wife in tow, began looking for neat things to sniff. I immediately headed toward the rock wall.
The thing that intrigued me about the wall was the incredible textures it contained, which made it pretty easy to frame interesting compositions. There was a thin layer of clouds that was helping prevent extreme contrast, I was standing at least 100 feet away, and the subject wasn’t moving so determining exposure settings was straightforward: f/9, ISO 100, and the shutter speed being whatever it was (for this particular image, it was 1/40 of a second).
Since the subject of the image is the textures of the rocks, my processing focused on emphasizing that quality. With tone curve adjustments, I increased the lighter areas of the image and darkened the shadow areas. I then used the Texture slider to further accentuate the rocks.
The rock’s contained orange and yellow color tones that were quite dominant, and I found them to be a bit overwhelming. I considered converting the file to black and white, but I felt the image lost something in the conversion. Instead, I reduced the luminance and saturation of the orange and yellow tones, and that worked perfectly.
Finally, I opened the file in Photoshop and sharpened the image using Topaz Labs’ Sharpen AI, which further refined the textures.
Since we had originally planned to stay at the park until Friday morning, I had planned to visit a couple of other areas before we left. However, I had been watching the weather all week, and the forecasters began calling for rain and snow beginning late Thursday night and into Friday with temperatures below freezing until at least Christmas Day.
I checked the weather forecasts again that evening and realized that while the winter weather would probably not arrive where we were until late Thursday, it was expected to arrive at our home by around noon on Thursday. My wife and I decided that our best course of action would be to check out early Thursday morning and try to get home before the storm arrived.
We left our cabin at Falls Creek Falls State Park at 3:00 Thursday morning. We were arriving home under a cloudy sky and temperature and arrived home around 11:00. By 4:00 that Thursday afternoon, the temperature had dropped to below freezing and kept falling.
By the time we got up Friday morning, the temperature was only 3 degrees, the windchill was -16 degrees, and parts of the interstate we’d had to travel to get home had iced over.
We had to eat the cost of the cabin for that extra night, but it turned out to be a cost well spent.