Was upstate on business last month and had time to spend the afternoon hiking Kaaterskill Falls. Color was not quite peak yet but was pretty nice. C&C welcome.
lovely captures, i can't believe i live nearby and haven't been here. the last three are my favorites - the water in some might be a tad bluish but otherwise the foliage colors are as brilliant as how they are here in the northeast!
Thanks Binh-
The entire gorge was in shade... I played with the WB and I felt that the rocks turned too yellow when trying to remove the blue from the water. On the color, I agree- I did very little to the saturation- upstate NY gets some of the most brilliant yellows and oranges around and I felt these were pretty accurate.
One word of warning- getting to the location of the falls it's easy- just off the highway, but the hike to the falls themselves is demanding. I had to stop a few times for a breather, and on my way back, many people asked me how much further and "Is it worth it?" IMO it is, but everyone has different ideas of "worth it".
Brings back many memories. As a younger man (retired in 1985) I worked as Telephone man in this area and hiked many of the lines that ran in he woods of these great mountains and the falls you show. I carried a Pentax 35mm film camera in my travels and captured many nice old barns, waterfalls and what ever else my eye would catch. I worked out of the Garage on Rt.23 and Ross Ruland Rd.
I like your captures of the falls and enjoyed seeing them again. Thanks for the memories.
Lou
PS
I post on the W&N forum and did a lot of work with the Endangered Species Unit back after retiring helping to restore the bald eagle to the area.
I enjoyed the first one the most. Great interplay between the layers of submerged and floating leaves and the reflections. I'd suggest a very slight crop to remove the little sliver of shoreline or wood at bottom center.
Thanks Dave. That caught my eye as I hiked along the river and it was a bit of a different shot for me. I agree that cropping that piece out would probably help it a bit.
Although the color may be quite "brilliant", I really think you need to pull back the luminosity (not saturation) a bit in the yellows and greens. The reason they look so oversaturated is because a lot the detail is lost. If you are using ACR, you can adjust the luminosity on specific colors to help recover some of that detail, and get a much more realistic interpretation of the scene.
As far as adjusting the color of the water, simply use a hue/saturation adjustment layer and pull back the saturation on the cyan. If this starts to effect other areas of the image, simply mask it out.
Well done. I love this area, but have never seen it in peak fall. I really like the last two, but agree some color adjustment would bring it to a more natural state.
