Ithaca sits in the hills at the southern end of Cayuga Lake, the longest of NY’s Finger Lakes. It is most definitely a college town, filled with a mix of student-oriented businesses and tourist shops. Overall it is quaint, with a bit of a hippie feel.

For nature photographers, it’s a sort of Mecca. “Ithaca is Gorges,” say the T-shirts, and that’s the truth. Within an easy 15 minute drive from downtown, there are at least 5 waterfall sites open to the public, covering everything from informal city access to lovely state parks. Over several years of visits I’ve seen most of them, as well as a few located farther from the city. On this trip, however, we only went to one – Lucifer Falls in the lovely Robert Treman State Park.

Lucifer Falls

Robert Treman State Park (not to be confused with Treman Marine Park on the lake) is set back into the hills a short drive west out of Ithaca. It is essentially comprised of a hiking trail that follows along the creek as it descends through a series of waterfalls before finally leaving the park at the lower entrance, which is a popular swimming hole. We hiked in from the top, since the most impressive falls are within the first 1/2 mile or so, culminating with Lucifer Falls itself.

I’ve done the hike before with a DSLR and backpack full of gear; even with the carved stone steps and excellent trail, it can be challenging with the extra weight. Since I was more interested in enjoying the hike, I took the little G10, although I unfortunately neglected to bring my table-top tripod. A combination of ISO 80, f/8, and the built-in ND filter let me reach shutter speeds as low as .3″, which was enough to let the water stream out, at the same time being just about too slow to hand hold, even with the IS. Where possible I braced the camera or myself against the stone; otherwise I went up a third-stop to 1/4 sec and shot multiple frames, hoping for a sharp one. This “spray & pray” philosophy wasn’t very advanced, but it did pay off with a few good shots.

Without the built-in ND filter, I’d have had no chance of slowing the water down, which goes to show just how bright the light really is, even on overcast days.

Overall, it was the perfect afternoon to be working around the falls. The foliage is still decent in the area, and the warm mineral tones in the rock mirrored it. Definitely better than a day in the office!

The weather began clearing at the same time that we started down the trail. The elevation of Ricketts Glen meant that there was snow at the top of the trail, which provided us with some of those iconic snow & foliage images that happen all to rarely. However, by the time we really started down the gorge, most of the snow had melted off, or never managed to collect at all. Still, a dozen waterfalls and brightly colored leaves are a combination that’s hard to beat, and I ended up with several shots I am very pleased with.

The combination of the new 7D and Slik tripod worked out very, very well. The Slik is all the tripod I’ll ever need and does its job very well. The legs are tight and don’t flop open or closed and it is rock solid. I used it extensively, since most of my exposures were a second or more in length. Had I been willing to lay down on the wet rocks, I could have gotten even lower than I did.

The 7D also met all my expectations. Aside from some quick shots I posted earlier, this was its first “trial by fire.” I used the 28-135mm IS & 17-40mm lenses throughout the day, and since I was working with waterfalls, nearly all my exposures were taken at ISO 100\ and f/8 – f/16. A combination of a polarizer and ND filters helped extend the exposures past 1 second.

Focus, metering, and performance were all excellent. (There were only a few occasions when the auto-focus selection didn’t get the spot I wanted, in which case I switched to manual point selection.) I started out using my wireless remote, but soon found it difficult to juggle the remote, tripod, and camera between locations, so I switched to just using the 2-second timer, along with the mirror lock up. (If I was going to be more stationary, I’d have stuck with the remote, which worked fine.)

The only problem I encountered came when I attempted to used a second ND filter in conjunction with the other two. The combination of all three filters threw off the white balance and resulted in a strong red color cast throughout the entire image. Attempting to correct for this with a user-defined Kelvin setting was only partially successful. Taking a custom white balance might have worked as well, but instead I just removed the second ND filter, since it wasn’t having that much of an effect on the exposure time anyway. Once removed, the default Cloudy white balance once more worked correctly.

Battery life during the day was excellent – four hours of shooting – most of them long exposures with mirror lock-up – still left me with over 75% battery power, according to the battery info screen. While I initially lamented the change to the new battery pack, I have to say, it really does seem to be an improvement in terms of power capacity and usage.

Since all of the day’s shooting took place at ISO 100 or 200, I can’t report on noise performance. At the settings I used, noise wasn’t an issue, which is what we’d all expect. I can say that I very much like the look of the images capture with the camera, and I do feel that they are an improvement over previous models.

On a final note, the increased megapixel count does eat into storage space. If you haven’t guessed it yet, 18mp reduces your shot count per memory card; my 8GB card now yields about 300 shots, depending on the circumstances. The greater implication here is that any card under 4GB in size becomes almost useless in any sort of serious shooting situation. I’d say that 4GB is the smallest size you should buy; if you plan to do wedding or commercial work, don’t bother with anything smaller than 8GB, with 16GB being an even better choice.

Canon 7D + 17-40mm / 28-135mm; ISO 100; f/8; 5″ – 15″.

You cannot visit Cooperstown, NY, without visiting baseball. You don’t have to be a diehard fan, you don’t even have to know the names of any players, or the rules of the game, or the roar of a stadium around you. Cooperstown is the home of baseball, the place where it is celebrated most. Even before you reach the Hall of Fame Museum, it is apparent that you are in a world that is defined by the game. The shops all sell baseball bats and memorabilia; the entrees in the cafes have names like “Shortstop stack of pancakes;” and in the center of town Doubleday Field holds court.

Cooperstown Diner

Doubleday Field is the birthplace of baseball, at least if you believe the plaque. It is a modest little field – a far cry from Yankee stadium – but with the modesty comes the feeling that you are welcome there. That you can climb into the stands and watch a game without worrying about anything, because there baseball is played not for money, but for love of the game.

Doubleday Field Plaque

The game at Doubleday Field

Baseball is original America, like Route 66 and Elvis and Independence Day. It is honest and pure, at least in this form. Step away from the major leagues, where the players are paid hundreds of millions of dollars to dope up and get caught in scandals, and you find a different game – a game that is still about nine guys on a field ready for the ball.

Watching a game at Doubleday field is an experience. This was the perfect autumn morning, crisp, with a sky so blue. This was a group of men – and even a woman – who were obviously there because they love baseball. They all wore different jerseys and sometimes it was a wonder that they even knew who was on which team. When they came up to the plate, they became serious and took their turn and made the most of it. But in the dugout they were light hearted and made jokes, and no one was strutting around or spitting chew or doing anything that would embarrass the game. You kind of got to figuring that these guys would rather do anything than embarrass the game.

In the dugout

Baseball. The crack of the bat, the puffs of dirt under a runner’s shoes, and the look of a field in the sunlight. I could have sat and watched all day. This wasn’t a commercial game, this was an art form, and the players artists.

If all I had been able to do this trip is sit and watch the game, it would still have been worth it.

At bat

Doubleday Field

Babe Ruth at the Baseball Hall of Fame

While we were there, the Fall Festival was taking place. The primary attraction? Giant pumpkins; huge, oversized, mutant pumpkins, pumpkins that are small if they only weight 800 lbs. Pumpkins so large that it takes a front-end loader to lift them onto the scale. Pumpkins that, after being weighed in and admired, are the next day hollowed out and floated across the lake in a regatta (I didn’t get to see that part, sadly). It is a quintessentially American celebration in the most quintessential of American towns – a celebration of home-grown excess coupled with bizarrity. And it was wonderful.

The weather was lovely, a blue autumn sky and puffy clouds in the morning, the sort of day where you don’t need the “vivid” setting on the camera – lift itself is vivid enough. I was using the G10 all day, carried along for convenience. This was a trip to make photos, but primarily it was a trip to get away and spend some time with Mandy, so juggling the DSLR and lenses was out. But that didn’t matter, the little Powershot was plenty: at ISO 80 and f/8, I was still getting good shutter speeds, and everything from here to Canada was in sharp focus.

In a place like this, where everything looks scenic, I tried to take shots that would show something true about it. The Fall Festival was remarkable for the pumpkins; the main street for its lovely, olden-time charm; the lake for the reflection of the sky and foliage on the water.

I ended by the lake, in a small park at the very headwaters of the Susquehanna River. It is hard to believe that such a large river, a river I grew up around, has such modest beginnings, but then I suppose that’s the way of most things. I spent some time photographing the headwaters, trying to capture the green tint. And I spent some more time photographing sailboats at their moorings, with the whole lake and autumn hills behind.

This was the most challenging set of the day; the scene was beautiful, but the light was starting to fall flat as the clouds built up. Without a tripod, true HDR was out of the question (the G10′s continuous shutter speed is far too slow to try and handhold three exposures). I settled for shooting a single RAW file at the best exposure I could get, and then processing it into a psuedo-HDR image at home. It was just enough to kick an edge back into the scene, without looking too fake.

This is the time of year when photographers should be out and about. It is a time filled with festivals, filled with celebrations of the harvest and of life, when small towns really shine and the hills are filled with color. Pretty soon we’ll all be griping about winter, dragging on in its third month of gloom. Find the time to enjoy autumn while we have it.

* Ricketts Glen State Park, PA – All of my previous visits to Ricketts have been during the summer with a photo club. But autumn is really the season to be there – I’ve seen photos of the gorge and waterfalls with the foliage, and I want to make some of my own images like that. The trick is getting a good overcast day; this may seem like an unusual hope, but it fits the location. Shooting in the gorge on a sunny day is hard – the dynamic range is far more than the camera can handle, with deep dark shadows and blasted sun spots all in the same scene. And without neutral density filters, forget trying to slow the shutterspeed and blur the water. An overcast day, however, evens out the light. Coupled with a polarizer, the foliage color will really pop amid the earth tones of the rocks and water.

Ricketts Glen State Park

* Ithaca, NY – I’ve traveled to Ithaca many times, in all seasons. It is one of my favorite places to go on a day trip; there are a lot of options all within a close distance. The game plan looks like this: get there in time for breakfast at the Ithaca Bakery {http://www.collegetownbagels.com/pages/home/home.php], which has AMAZING goodies. Then off to Robert Tremen State Park for a hike down to Lucifer Falls and back (this is my favorite of Ithaca’s parks).

Lucifer Falls @ Robert Tremen State Park

Then a stop at Tuchannock Falls State Park, where the falls are lovely, but my real focus is the riverbed; when the water is low, it’s possible to forego the trail and hike up the bedrock riverbed itself, which is very cool. Then it’s off to the wine country between Cayuga and Seneca Lakes. There are some lovely vineyards there, most with cafes/shops, so there’s the promise of a nice lunch. Lodi Point State Park is on the list of places to stop. Lodi Point is a tiny park, but the stone beach is nice, and last time I visited, it was full of sea glass – glass bottle shards worn smooth by the wave action against the stones.

* Raptor Migration - Council Cup Scenic Overlook sits on the east shore of the Susquehanna River south of Wilkes-Barre, and is said to be a great spot from which to view the autumn raptor migration. I’ve never seen a raptor migration before, but my understanding is that if conditions and timing are right, you can see a <i>lot</i> of raptors. This is definitely a long-lens adventure – although as adventures go, I expect it will be more stationary than usual.

* Salt Springs State Park - off all the places I’ve visited, this modest little park is the one I return to with the most joy. Salt Springs looks unassuming; from the website along, you might not even bother with it. The first time I visited, I barely spent any time at all. Later, I realized that there is far more to it than initially meets the eye. I’ll save a full review for a later date, but in terms of my autumn checklist, I want to be there, on the main field, for sunrise. I’ve yet to miss an autumn sunrise there since I started visiting several years back, and from the main field – situated atop a hill and frequently mown for hay – the view is spectacular.

Autumn Dawn @ Salt Springs State Park

I also want to spend some time hiking in the high fields, which are sparsely visited. Hopefully I’ll get there while the grass is still tall; I want some daytime long exposures of the grass in motion. And I’m thinking that an overcast day might be best for this as well – get that cold autumn feeling, with the blazing foliage and the wind in the grass.

* Outdoor Portraits - I’ve got a couple of friends who might be willing models, and I seem to be hung up on the whole gloomy day thing. Partly that’s because a gloomy autumn day, with that coolness the light gets, mixed with the warm foliage, looks really neat. And part of it may just be that I’m tired of trying to fight pure daylight when using strobes outside. Either way, I’d like to get a model or two out in a field/woods and do some portraits. (I’m also giving serious thought to a Canon 85mm f/1.8 lens, which would be awesome in a situation like this.)

Outdoor Portraits

I’m thinking something along these lines, but instead of the warm summer light, aiming for moody autumn light.