The first good sunrise is quite some time. The lake is down so there is more shoreline to work with, but the only available spots within reasonable driving time have very little vegetation along the shore. So ya work with what ya get.
A selection of pictures from two hikes in early October. The first was at Island Ford along the Chattahoochee River. The second was at Pine Log Creek out west of Waleska, GA.
The weather for the Island Ford hike was sunny and quite hot. I did not carry all my lenses to save weight (and sweat), and I guessed wrong on which lenses to bring. I needed the 55-300 mm lens but left that home.
At Pine Log creek, the weather was a lot cooler and partly cloudy, so the hike was easier and I brought most of my kit. However, this time I did not use more than one lens. Perhaps I should have. I could have.
A hike with the Hearthstone Hikers from the Pigeon Hill lot south to Cheatham Hill vial the Hardage Mill trail, returning by the Noses Creek trail. It was a hot and humid day or we might have gone further.
These pictures are not in the order I took them. For some reason unknown, the software will not order them as I wish.
The Sonny Day Hikers ventured to a part of the AT we had not hiked before. The first mile (up to the falls) is shared by the AT and Benton-MacKaye trails. After a break at the falls, we stayed on the AT for a while before returning to the Three Forks parking area.
It was a good day photographically, with nice light through the trees and not much wind. Found the best spiderweb in a long time in a spot where I could get a good background. We often find webs that can’t be seen from and angle with enough contrast to see them in the picture.
Some of us from the North Georgia Photography Club traveled to Lake Rutledge to attempt to photograph the Milky Way. We arrived before sunset and were rewarded with some excellent reflected light in the clouds and water.
The clouds stayed until about 2:00 am, but I left about 11:30 pm so I missed the stars in favor of getting home safely.
An exploratory hike by the Sonny Day Hikers turned out to be a very nice hike. The original intent was to turn around at the top of Deadennen Mtn, but most of the group chose not to go that far. The climb of Wilscot Mtn was enough. The distance from there to Deadennen Mtn is not that great, but it is a steep down/up and then reverse on the return. The trail itself is quite smooth and easy to walk.
More late wildflowers and mushrooms found again. And I played more with ICM photography.
A brief visit to the falls with visiting family. We hiked as far as the bottom of the steps, then drove to the West Ridge Trail to see the upper part of the falls, then had lunch at the lodge.
Not the best day or time of day for photography. Broken clouds and building thunderstorms, but very, very harsh light when the sun was not behind a cloud, and even then still very bright.
The falls are barely visible from the bottom of the trail because the trees have grown considerably in the past 25 years, and because everything is fully leafed-out. So limited photo ops.
A mixed bag of images from the last two weeks of August 2019. I was not shooting much, both because of the heat/humidity, the harsh light of mid-summer days and a lot of other things to do. So this is what I got.
As noted in my previous post, I’m playing with Intentional Camera Movement (ICM) for landscapes as a means to a little different sort of compositions when I can’t find something that grabs my attention.
In mid-August 2019 the Sonny Day Hikers did an exploratory hike on a bit of trail none of us had ever hiked before, and now we wonder why not. The trail is a relatively flat section of the AT, at least the 2.3 miles or so we traveled before turning back. A very pleasant, not overly difficult hike.
Surprisingly, we found a variety of wild flowers blooming. Most notable was three separate clumps of Turk’s Cap Lilys (Lilium superbum if you wan the Latin name.) According to our resident expert, these are rare in Georgia but more common further north.