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A Tale of two creeks Richland and Falling Water–02_21_19 Featured Arkansas Photography

Fall scene featuring Richland and Falling Water Creek at their confluence.

A tale of two Creeks, Falling Water and Richland Creeks, Newton County Arkansas taken November 2018. 

Taken with a Nikon D850 and 24-70 lens.  Image capture in 3 horizontal images @ 24mm.  I used both a CL-PL and ND filter to slow the exposure for the water.

If I had to pick a favorite spot in Arkansas, it would have to be Richland Creek.  Most defiant a love/hate relationship as Richland alone has cost me more in camera gear than any other location I like to photograph.  Just this fall I lost both a Nikon D850 and 24-70 lens upstream from where this shot was taken.  Totally my fault and lucky for me, the creek was much lower so I was able to recover the gear and Nikon USA was able to repair it at a reasonable cost.  But that’s another story. 

Richland Creek is one of the fascinating creeks in Arkansas.  At medium to high water levels it’s a great kayaking stream.  The creek is lined with hardwoods most are 2nd generation growth as the creek was logged back in both the great depression and again in the 60’s-70’s.  Most of the old growth trees are long gone but if you hike far enough upstream where the mules and loggers never reached you can still find some huge white oaks.

The creek also winds through some of the most remote parts of Arkansas, that are still remaining.  Most of the watershed is now a wilderness area.  There is a primitive hiking trail that works it’s way up the left side of the creek (left side facing upstream).  This trail will lead all the way to Twin Falls and Richland Falls, well worth the trip.

For most the season, Richland hold water, but in the fall it’s very rare to find a good flow like the one shown in this image.  Instead the creek is usually barely covering the rocks.  The fall colors are getting tricky to catch also.  In the past the peak display tended to be around the middle of October now the peak seems to be more in the first week of November.  But the display is now hard to catch in full.  Notice in this shot most of the larger trees on the left have dropped their leaves, but the willows and smaller hardwoods lining the creek are still in full color.  However upstream many of the larger trees are still hold leaves.  So you just have to go and see what you have.

To take this shot, I had to wade out into the creek to mid thigh deep.  I found a rock that allowed me to place my tripod and camera safely above the creek.  Still after the disaster I had just 1 week prior, I was a bit shaky on working in the creek.   Still it was just too much not to get out and risk the shot.  There was little to no wind and just as I arrived the deeply overcast sky started to breakup and gave me some nice mixed light.

Due to the high water levels, I was able to catch Falling Water Creek on the left of the shot.  Falling Water Creek runs into Richland at the Richland Campground.  Falling water breaks into several channels near the it’s mouth with Richland and this one is the smallest.  It hardly ever flows unless Richland is running at a high level.  So I was grateful to catch both creeks in the same shot with some of the most amazing fall color I have seen on the creek.

 

Written by Paul Caldwell for www.photosofarkansas.com.  Please contact the author before using any part of this in a separate publication. 

12/14/15 Copying and Pasting images–Sadly it seems to be the norm that no one respects copyright rules on the web

Recently, a friend of mine sent me this link:

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/446278644299056070/

 

On a closer inspection as you can see here:

An example of copyright infringement

An example of copyright infringement

 

In this case a person named Deborah Radican, pulled a copy of one of my best images, “Foggy Morning View, on the Buffalo River”, from a site called indulgy.com.  There is no mention of me, or my work and the fact that this particular image is offered for sale on my website.

It seems now to be the normal process when someone sees a photograph on a website, even if the site is copyright protected, just to go ahead and screen print the shot, and post it on their site, be it Facebook, Pintrest, or God Forbid, Twitter.  The world has become a “whats in it for me now” type society and there is no longer any respect for the person or persons working.  The fact that this particular photograph was very special to me, and took a lot of time to get right, is just cast aside.  What concerns me even more, the fact that on indulgy.com, the image is shown with my name cropped out.  This means that someone actually took the time to copy the shot, and then crop out my name thus not giving me any credit.

If you want to take my work and copy it to your site, at least ask me, as all I want is credit for the work.  In this case, a photograph that has sold across Arkansas, and has been hung in both Hospitals, Business Offices and homes, now has become just totally trashed on the web.  The image is poorly shown, and the color is off.  If someone decided to take my photograph, and then work on it, well, that is beyond me.  If you want to do that, then hike up there yourself, wait for 4 hours till the sun gets just to the right spot, then shoot it.

This has forced me to so something I have not wanted to do, add a visible copyright to all my work.  This mars the shot on the web and takes away from the image, however there really is not other recourse since I have found so many of my shots just haphazardly pasted on other website.  I just it’s just a sign of the times and points to just how much damage the iPhone has done to photography overall.

 

New version of Foggy Morning View with Copyrighting

New version of Foggy Morning View with Copyrighting

 

 

 

11/19/15 Red Sky at Night Sailors Delight!!, Wonderful evening shot from the upper Piney Creek Wilderness Arkansas

Piney Creek Arkansas

Sunset from a bluff in the Piney Creeks Wilderness

This is a shot that I like to think, puts all things back into perspective.  For 2015, the Autumn in Arkansas the colors were just terrible.  We also had a lot of rain late in October, which was too late for the streams.  All the streams are running now, but of course they look like they do in winter, just bare trees.  I like to work some of the smaller creeks in Arkansas during fall as the combination of fall colors and running water can be additive.  Arkansas has so many streams, one could never work all of them in a lifetime.  But what we found this year, were mainly cloudy skies, and dry creek beds.  The spring and summer had been so promising.  We had record amounts of rainfall and cool conditions.  But then July, and August.  Basically Arkansas recorded almost no rainfall during these months and it was hot.  Basically what happens, the trees start to go dormant and into protect mode.  If this continues for a long period of time, it will have a negative effect on the fall colors. 

What we basically saw in the fall in most of the spots, were trees turning a dull brown, even in early October.  But even worse, some trees, were staying green much longer so there was no balance in the colors.  I have seen shots from all over Arkansas, and in most of them you are still able to see quite a bit of green trees and most of the trees that have turned are just brown, or dull red.  Gone from the woods this year were the bright yellows, and reds, mainly from the Black Gums, Maples, Black Gums, Hickories and Golden browns from the Oaks. 

I had found a great new spot in the upper Piney Creeks wilderness thanks to Chris Kennedy.  Chris had found this place a week before during the opening of Arkansas Deer season.  I had been here a lot during my kayaking days in Arkansas, but had never taken some time to go look for fall color.  This is a great spots as you are looking due south on one side of Parker Ridge Road and if you cross over and take a short hike, you are looking north.  Either view gives an expansive view of the valley of Big Piney Creek.  If we had been here just one week earlier, the possiblites were endless as it was apparent that the trees in this part of the state did not go into as much stress.

Chris and I drove back to this spot a week later, and most of the color was gone, at least in the trees.  We had a mixed sky with only partial clear patches, but Chris felt it was worth staying around until about 20 minutes after the sun had set.  He had been here before and felt we might get a great play on the afterglow.  He was right, as you can see in this shot, the sun’s angle was just at the right position to really pop the clouds and just painted the sky red.  Chris took this shot with his phone, and it’s a good one even from a phone.  You can see both cameras setup and a good bit of the view from the place were were setup. 

In the spring, this might be another great place to setup, and I hope to come back here for both a milky way shoot and star trails shoot.  It’s not far from the road so working at night will not be a big danger to the photographer. 

But back to my opening, yes this shot did put things back into perspective for me.  I had been chasing color on and off for 30 days and just had not found anything to feature for this year.  In fact this will the first year I have basically no photograph from the fall in Arkansas.  Maybe I am just tired of it, and don’t have the energy anymore as the market I am shooting in has changed dramatically in the past 3 years.  But it was nice to sit on this bluff edge, and think back over the years that I have enjoyed in Arkansas’s outdoors.  We have a beautiful state in many ways. 

04/30/14 New Images added to my Arkansas Panorama Gallery

Haw Creek Falls Sunset Arkansas

Haw Creek Falls in Arkansas, taken at sunset.

I have recently added several new panoramas taken throughout Arkansas to my Panorama Gallery.  You can view the images here:

Over the years, I have started to shoot more panoramas than standard format photography as I feel it gives a better view of landscape subjects.  Many times I will shoot both ways, but after reviewing the images I will come back to the panorama images.  I have found three  ways to accomplish this:

1.  You can take the shot in a panorama format, which involves using special equipment to keep the foreground and background in focus.

2.  You can take one high resolution image and crop into it with a 3:1 ratio.  This requires a image of 50MP or more to allow for a large print.

3.  Setup your camera for a nodal pan.

With my current equipment I can work this either way since I can now use my Arca rm3di camera to allow for a stitching capture.   I can pick up as much as 18mm of new image details on each side of the center, and since I am stitching, not panning the camera, I will not have to worry about parallax issues.  Parallax comes about when you pan your camera/lens combination without consideration for the nodal point of that particular camera/lens.  What will occur most times with parallax errors is foreground and background elements of your subject will not line up.

With a digital back of 60MP it’s also possible to crop into a single image to a 3:1 ratio which is the standard for panoramas.  This most times will leave me around 25MP to work with and from that I can get a print sized to around 24″ x 60″ or 36″ x 72″.  Working this way is much faster as you don’t have to worry about merging the stitched images together.  During this process you can run into color balance issues or blurring, as the wind may have picked up during the stitching process and effected one of the 3 stitches.   This process allows you the greatest amount of freedom to compose as you can shoot with a tripod if the shutter speed allows it.

When time and conditions permit, I will try to work in a nodal pan also.  This is by far the most complicated of the three solutions as you have to have several factors taken into account:

1.  You will need a tripod that is level

2.  Your camera and lens need to set to the correct nodal point

3.  A panning head is usually required to help keep the panning lined up.

4.  Some form of stitching software will be needed to put the images together

5.  Most times even with a nodal solution, there will be issues while lining up the images

6.  Working with wide angles lenses is still complicated

The main reason I don’t prefer to use this setup is that you need to be level as if you pan with a non-level tripod, you will add all types of distortions to the final image.  Many times even if you have the camera/lens set to the correct nodal point, many of the images won’t come together correctly since I am mainly working with wide angle lenses.  This solution does allow for the highest amount of final resolution as you are using about 80% of the sensor on each shot the rest being lost to overlap.

Panoramas are very challenging, but can offer the photographer an excellent final image that can be printed in many more possible output solutions.

 

 

 

11/19/13 Some more thoughts on my nighttime photography

Stary night at Sam's Throne

Stary night at Sam’s Throne–Click on photography for a larger image

I have a new write-up on some of my nighttime photography throughout Arkansas.   I have place a small gallery inside the article and then have some descriptions about the various images.  Each of the images involves a different form of photographic technique such as stacking, or single long exposures.  I have have a shot of a lightening bolt directly over Pinnacle Mountain that was taken during a series of images I took during the storm.  These are some of my favorite images from the last few years.   You can read the entire article here: