As a photographer living in Upstate New York, I have an abundance of natural beauty in the way of the Great Lakes, Adirondack Mountains and the Finger Lakes I can easily visit.

The Finger Lakes were created when the glaciers retreated over 10,000 years ago. The geology surrounding each of the lakes are made up of shale and limestone which creeks and streams flowing into the lakes eroded over time to create canyons and impressive waterfalls of varying shapes, sizes and drops. This past weekend, I visited three to photograph them with the fall colors.

As you can see Carpenter Falls looks very different then when I was there just one month ago. Unfortunately, the two days before my arrival had rain and very brisk winds which stripped a lot of the colorful leafs from the surrounding trees. While there was some color from the Birch trees, all the reds and oranges from maples and oaks had mostly fallen to the forest floor. I will try again next year.

Cow Sheds Falls in the Fillmore Glen State Park in Moravia had a lot of leafs on the rocks surrounding Dry Creek which flows over the falls and through the gorge the park protects. Using a circular polarizing filter on my wide angle zoom lens to cut down glare and reflections, I was able to capture the waterfall and the path of the water over and under the rocks and debris found at the base of the falls using a long exposure of 3 seconds

Again, I visited Chittenango Falls State Park back in July of this year and wanted to see how it would look after Nature splashed colors above and surrounding the cascading waterfall the park is named after. With the Sun still lighting up the trees and sky above the falls, I decided to take a set of photos from -2EV to +2EV in 1 stop intervals which I merged into Skylum’s Aurora HDR 2019 software to create a High Dynamic Range (HDR) image which I finished processing in Adobe Lightroom Classic.

As you can see, I was able to visit each location easily in one day. I logged about 150 miles in doing so from my home near Syracuse, New York.