You know I can’t stay away from North Carolina for too long; in fact, I apparently visit every two years like clockwork and have since 2018. But I had never been in spring, so I took advantage of some time off I had at the end of April and drove myself to Asheville, making the usual nine-plus-hours sojourn to the heart of Blue Ridge country.
This was a waterfall trip, and I’m excited to show you the results! I can’t even count how many falls I’ve been to in the Blue Ridge and Great Smoky Mountains, but the three below are all ones I have been to at least once before, so I knew what I was getting.
The first to show off is my official favorite: Glen Falls.
I discovered this falls in a handy waterfall companion book back in 2018 and it’s been on my mind ever since. Look how graceful the flow, how varied the currents, how it all seems to blend together into one shape that might have been crafted by human hands. I can’t think of many waterfalls as purely imaginative as this one.
I also had my (relatively, now) new Nikon D850 with me for only the second time, and I love how it captures the water. I used to think waterfalls required exposures of two or three seconds, but here I was able to do maybe 1/4 of a second and still get that almost cottony texture to the water. (Having a tripod always helps, even when it adds like ten pounds to your backpack) I can’t find my remote shutter so I instead used the shutter timer at 2 seconds, which meant I could press the shutter and then steady the tripod before the shutter clicked. (A lot of times the force of the rushing water creates ground quakes that you can’t feel but the camera will pick up if not secured)
To get to Glen Falls you have to drive a couple hours from Asheville, eventually into the Nantahala National Forest through which winds the Cullasaja River Gorge. Let me tell you - you can either drive, or look at the river, but you can’t do both; the road is just too curvy. Thankfully there are some pullouts, and I spied a wonderful, spontaneous waterfall at one of them that I took a few snaps of. Dry Falls is also located in the Gorge, relatively easy to trek down to using a series of manmade stairs. (When I talk about hiking level of difficulty, I can’t help but put it in terms of people who would otherwise find these kind of places inaccessible due to hip replacements, neuropathy, sciatica - I just really get bummed out that so much beauty is kind of reserved for the fully healthy and physically strong)
Speaking of hiking, the Glen Falls trail is about 0.6 miles to the falls pictured above, but it is marred by stairs that are higher than normal height so you end up negotiating around them in the brush anyway. I found it highly annoying. It looks like they’ve begun some light construction to fix the stairs - essentially to make one step into two - so maybe when I go back it will make more sense. Also, I thought I saw a bear.
The next waterfall is Crabtree Falls:
This falls is incredibly special in person. You can take a photo of it, but it just can’t capture the exact way the water towers above you from the viewing bridge or the power of a rushing cascade. You really have to go there to experience it. But I did my best to photograph it anyway. :)
One thing I found interesting is that on my entire trip, I was the only person with a DSLR that I saw. People commented on my “vintage” setup while they fiddled with their phone’s camera. I realized that, back in 2009 and 2010, the bridge would have been full of people like me angling for a space with their tripods and their Canons and Sonys and Fujifilms. Now all of that has changed. And for a good reason - camera phones are pretty amazing. But…they still, for now, have their limitations compared to an actual digital camera, including post-processing flexibility and the ability to print large-scale. If I took the above photo with my phone, no way I could print it for a portfolio, nor would I want to.
The Crabtree Falls hike is actually pretty fun but it gets wet and rocky so you’d be obliged to wear hiking boots. I saw a lot of jaunty young folks in trainers and just thought, what is it about me, Lord? Why do I feel every pebble unless I’m in a $200 pair of boots??
The third waterfall is the lower falls at Hanging Rock:
You can see right away that it was a sunny day. (Again, I only ever have limited time on these trips, sigh) The best condition for waterfall photography is a cloudy day, so I broke out my +6 neutral density filter and popped it onto my lens. The filter automatically ‘stops down’ the exposure on your camera further than it can normally go, basically creating a dark screen to film through. Sometimes this is difficult because if the overall conditions are too dark, then the camera can’t focus. But on this day I was fine. The important thing was to keep from capturing any big or blown-out highlights on the white water; and this is where using a DSLR in my opinion is quite superior to just a camera phone. The original photos are very dark save for the waterfall itself, but because the D850 is able to capture so much information, all I had to do was raise the shadows and voila - the rest of the scenery was restored.
I still would have loved to have gotten this on a cloudy day, but I like the slightly tropical feel it has otherwise. The hike to this falls is very easy until you get to a massive set of steps, so if you have bad knees or a heart condition, just take it slow.
The last falls that I took dedicated photos of was Looking Glass Falls, which I’d been to at least three times before but it’s just so easy to get to (literally right off the road in Pisgah National Forest) and as mentioned, I hadn’t been in spring. It turned out to be a bit of a turbulent shoot - it was windy and the spray from the falls got all on the camera lens, and the sun was way up in the sky (even though the falls were in shadow) so there was a bunch of sun glare and I hadn’t brough a lense hood. So to me, this photo is messy, but still has some charm to it. Some. :)
I got to capture some other things while I wasn’t hiking or driving to a hike, like the first evening when I visited Cowee Mountain Overlook at sunset. Whilst the skies didn’t cooperate, the vista really shows the capabilities of the D850 with its 47MP in getting all that fine, faraway detail to make the contours of the mountains stand out. You can see in previous mountain photos that I’ve taken with the D810 that there is in comparison, not as much to “see.” You even get the sense that you’re getting every branch of every tree, and every leaf on every branch, and I just love it.
With it being spring and pretty rainy, the morning fog on the Blue Ridge Parkway actually got pretty intense Saturday morning as I was driving to the Crabtree Falls hike, but it made for cool photos that I’ll never get at home:
And of course, there were flowers. NOT nearly as many as I’d hoped, meaning that full spring doesn’t come to western North Carolina until at least May and into June, but I got to get a little practice in. Now, I always tell myself that I’ll rent a macro lens and then I completely forget, so I end up having to settle for my 100-400mm lens, but as you can see, it does the job. These are not “macro” photos but the fine detail on these tiny flowers is really incredible (especially using the D850!) and these are handheld shots, meaning the vibration stability on the lens is just out of this world.
And just a couple more fun shots using a darker editing process (the trick is to use a very low ISO to get the deep blacks in the background):
So all in all worth it, I would say! I hope you’ve enjoyed this little review of my trip. Still got my Colorado wildflower trip coming up at the end of July, and so far the trip leader has advised me to get in shape!! Treadmill here I come!
