Petit Jean State Park

In my continuing search for autumn colors, I took a recent trip to Petit Jean State Park.  There had been several days of cooler temperatures, and I figured the conditions would have been even better on top of the mountain.  When I arrived, I found some patchy areas of color, but they had not yet reached their peak.

I realized I hadn’t been to Cedar Falls, Petit Jean State Park’s “main attraction,” in several years.  I decided to hike the trail to the most famous, and probably most visited, waterfall in Arkansas.  As I made my way down the trail, I began to envision a specific image I wanted to make. 

There had been an incredible amount of rain over the previous couple of weeks, so I knew both the waterfall and Cedar Creek would be flowing at full throttle.  There were also a lot of leaves that had already fallen to the ground.  I began to visualize an image in which fallen leaves covered a large rock with the waterfall in the background.

I took my time along the trail with frequent stops to photograph several small waterfalls and cascades that had been created from all of the rain.  Finally, I arrived at Cedar Falls and was astounded at the volume of water that was coming over the top.  The sound of the flowing water was so loud that I had trouble hearing people talking to me even though we were at least 100 to 150 feet away from the waterfall.

There were a lot of large rocks covered with leaves, but I wanted to find one where the leaves didn’t look like someone had gone over them with a rolling pin.  I wanted them to look, as much as possible, like they had just fallen, not like they had been there for days or weeks.

I spent 10 or 15 minutes scouting the area to find exactly what I was looking for.  The rocks were very wet and slippery, so I had to move slowly and carefully.  Nothing good would come from a misstep.  One mistake and I would end up falling into the swiftly rushing creek, breaking a leg, or both.  Certainly, none of those options was a desirable outcome. 

However, the work eventually paid off, and I found this composition.  It had all the elements I had envisioned – a large rock covered in colorful leaves with Cedar Falls in the background.

In Adobe Camera Raw, I adjusted the exposure, contrast, and several other aspects of the picture.  I then opened the file in Photoshop and applied the Tonal Contrast filter, one of my favorite filters in Nik’s Color Efex Pro 4.  This filter provided a little more “pop” to the leaves on the foreground rock.  Finally, I cloned out a small plant that was in the bottom corner of the frame that I found to be rather distracting.

Settings:  45mm, 0.8 sec, f/22, 100 ISO