11/12/15 Featured Arkansas Landscape Photography–Haw Creek falls in Autumn

Haw Creek Falls in Autumn, what could have been for 2015

Taken with a Canon 1ds MkI, and and Canon 24-70 lens, iso 200.

I had to dig back a few years to find this, as it goes back to 2004, but since Arkansas had such a terrible fall in 2015 I have found myself doing this a lot lately.  Haw Creek has some wonderful fall color displays but catching the falls with water in them and fall colors is one of the harder things to do.  On the afternoon I caught this shot, I have been driving around looking for late fall color, stopping at both Falling Water Falls, and Richland Creek, but neither of them had much water.  For some reason the rain that fell the night before did hit the Haw Creek drainage harder and the falls were running.  I almost did not make the driver over from Lurton on Hwy 7, but was glad I did.

I was able to setup and get this shot before the sun moved over to the lower left of the frame.  As it was the sun was perfect hitting on both the falls and the pool below.  Note the green color, which is common to all Arkansas Ozark streams, but seems to be more prominent in the fall and winter.  I have always assumed it’s due to the limestone content in the water.

I shot this photograph in 3 separate segments as I was wanting to get more overall resolution.  The older Canon 1ds MKI only had 11MP and that’s just not enough for a large print.  Now that Lightroom has added a stitching solution, I am going back to a lot my older Canon work, either from the 1ds or 1ds MKII as both cameras captured great color, but I was using either a totally manual stitching method or a Zork adapter.  Using Lightroom’s new solution makes for a much faster stitching process and you are left with a dng file.  This allows you still use Lightroom’s excellent tools on the image as if it was a raw file.

This year, the colors were terrible at Haw Creek, mainly brown.  The water level was actually pretty good for a few day’s and I ran into a few photographers up there, but I didn’t even get my camera out.  The trees just didn’t have any life to them.