I visited Brown County State Park on the second day of our Fall of 2020 visit to Indiana, where I photographed near a number of pull outs along roadways through the park and while hiking a couple of trails in the park.
This post will consist of the photos made near the roadway.
Thanks for following,
Ken
This post contains more of the images that I made in the wooded area around our cabin in late October, 2020.
A few, but not all, of the images in this post have been uploaded to my Flickr page. More about this visit to Indiana to come,
Ken
In 2019 we were in Indiana the third week of October, which was at least one week early for the peak of fall color. So we scheduled our 2020 visit for the last week of October, which was projected to be the peak time for fall color there. Wrong! The peak came one or two weeks earlier in 2020, then storms the week prior to our visit, removed leaves from most of the mature trees. Fortunately, there were still a few trees, mostly the ones in the forest understory, with fall foliage remaining.
We stayed in a cabin a few miles from Brown County State Park, which is a popular place for fall foliage viewing. The first day in the cabin, I walked around the wooded area on which the cabin was located, making images of the remaining fall color.
It was windy and I was shooting handheld, so I used much higher ISO than I liked to get a sufficiently high shutter speed to freeze the motion of the leaves. Unfortunately, this results in noisy photographs.
I did what I could to reduce the noise, but there are tradeoff in this process. Too much noise reduction makes the fuzzy images even more fuzzy.
The high ISO can also result in blown out highlights in portions of images. I did not use graduated neutral density filters, since these are problematic in wooded areas with no clearcut line between bright areas and darker area in a composition. I did apply software ND effects, which helps, but software filters are not as good as real physical filters.
To avoid the blown out highlights, I sometimes eliminated the sky in compositions and sometimes cropped out as much of the blown out portions of the images as I could, while trying to maintain a “reasonable” composition.
I was not pleased with many of my photos, even most of the ones that I elected to process, due to these conditions.
And it did not help that I missed the peak color.
Continued later,
Ken
This is a continuation of my visits to Indiana covered bridges in October, 2019. I am including multiple bridges in this post, due to the limited photographic opportunities at these bridges.
The Edna Collins Bridge (follow the link to read more about the haunting of this bridge) is a short bridge along a narrow paved roadway. I parked on the side of the road, after getting out to check to be sure it was safe to pull onto the steeply dipping shoulder.
There was no way to get down into the creek to shoot a side view. The bridge is aligned approximately east-west, so shooting from the west side in the late afternoon was best.
Leaving Edna Collins, I drove to Crooks Bridge. There is much confusion about the history of this bridge. Follow the embedded link to read about it. This seemed to be a popular bridge on one of the Covered Bridge Festival routes, as there was a fair amount of tourist traffic that I had to contend with as I looked for ways to shoot it. My shots from one end at an angle to the bridge, resulted in a very tilted look that I could not adequately correct. I also attempted to shoot from a low water, concrete crossing beside the bridge, but I could not get anything worth sharing from that perspective, looking into the afternoon sunlight. Finally, I walked down the steep slope on the northwest corner of the bridge into the creek bed, from which I got this shot:
From Crooks Bridge, I continued to McAllister Bridge. I parked at a pull off area and began to walk around the bridge checking out various view points before getting out my camera gear. On my way back to the vehicle to get my gear, another car pulled up and a couple of ladies emerged and began walking towards the bridge. As they passed me one said, “Houston”. It was obvious that she had seen my Texas license plate. I thought that she was asking, if I was from Houston, but she was actually telling me that she was from Houston and went on to say she was visiting relatives in the area. I had lived in Katy, in the western portion of the greater Houston area and of course she knew about Katy. Such a small world.
Shooting options at McAllister were limited. I could see no way to get any interesting shots and I ended up with common views. This image, shot from the edge of the roadway, looking up at the front and side of the bridge, is the most interesting perspective that I got.
Continuing on my way, I stopped at Neet Bridge, but I could see no way to get interesting shots today, so I continued to Roseville. I experienced the same at Roseville, but I did make a few images with my iPhone, drove across the bridge, just because I was there, turning around and crossing it again to head towards Harry Evans Bridge.
Many of the covered bridges have the “Cross this bridge at a walk” warning, but I saw no vehicles heeding this advice. Most went much faster than I can walk and I can walk fast.
It was getting late in the day and the settings for the last few bridges that I visited were not interesting, so I did not bother getting out my DSLR and shot with my iPhone. Some of these might be more interesting to shoot later in the fall or winter.
By the time I got to the Zacke Cox Bridge, it was very late in the afternoon and time to begin the drive back to my wife’s cousin’s house.
This is the last of the October, 2019 covered bridges posts. Maybe I will get back to this area in the fall of 2020 and have opportunities to see more of the covered bridges.
Until next time,
Ken
The third stop on day two of photographing Indiana covered bridges was the Dick Huffman Bridge. I’m including a link to another bloggers site for his coverage of this bridge, rather than my usual links to an official government site.
As I was making my first shots of this bridge a number of vehicles crossed at intermittent intervals, stirring up dust, which I had to wait to clear. One pickup truck stopped just passed the bridge. The driver got out and walked towards the bridge. As he passed, he said he was going to check the water flow. I thought maybe he was doing some sort of official survey. As I walked back through the bridge and was passing him, he explained that the following day was the youth duck hunting season opening and that he was taking his son duck hunting by putting a boat in at another location and floating down the creek. He had hopped to not have to paddle the boat, but the flow looked very minimal, so he was going to have to paddle down the creek.
The bridge is not really leaning as much as it appears in the above photograph. Shooting from this angle the wide angle distortion accentuates the tilt and I could not remove it without tilting the roadway in the process.
Back on the other side of the bridge, I walked through the wooded area bordering the creek and found a way to get down into the creek. It was a little muddy along the creek edge, but I managed to avoid the worst of the mud. However, I had a limited area in which I could move around in the muddy channel, unless I wanted to get really muddy.
The log makes a good leading line object, but I wish I could have gotten closer to the bridge.
Until next time,
Ken
The second bridge I visited in my second day of photographing Indiana covered bridges in October, 2019 was Houck Bridge. Although Houck Bridge seems to be in very good condition, it has been by passed and is now closed to traffic.
One can still walk through the bridge, but not drive through it. Access to the creek level is most easily gained from the west side. There is also a sizable parking lot on the west side of the bridge, so I am guessing that this bridge is now set up as a prime tourist attraction. A couple of people did come and go, while I was here.
The interior photograph is an HDR image made from multiple exposures.
Next up: Dick Huffman Bridge.
Ken
After a day of other activities, I took another afternoon to visit more covered bridges in an area east of Indianapolis, Indiana. I started at Oakalla Bridge, just south of the last bridge (Dunbar) that I had visited during my first day of shooting covered bridges.
I think most of the covered bridges have some graffiti on or around them and Oakalla Bridge seems to be popular with those who like to mark things with graffiti. I saw some evidence of graffiti being painted over on the exterior of the bridge and other graffiti in the interior.
It is also easy to get down into the creek channel from one side of the bridge. The long log in the creek below the bridge even has graffiti on it.
There was plenty of room to move around on the wide sandy bank on one side of the bridge. I made numerous images from this area, but in the end, I only chose a couple of those as most representative of the bridge and its setting to include in this post.
More on Indiana covered bridges to come,
Ken
The last bridge that I got to late in the afternoon of my first day of photographing Indiana covered bridges was the Dunbar Bridge. There was more traffic across this bridge than any of the other bridges that I had photographed earlier in the day, maybe because it was late in the day and people were going home after their work day was over.
Wide angle lens distortion, especially when shooting from one side at an angle to the plane of the bridge, makes these bridges appear to be leaning to one side. Some bridges were actually leaning a little and/or the sides were not vertical, so the distortion exaggerates the lean or angle. I try to correct this in post processing, but sometimes it is not possible to completely correct the distortion.
To get to the creek for a side image, I had to walk beneath the bridge from the only easily accessible route. This appears to be a popular place for young people, judging by the graffiti and many footprints in the sand. Looking closely at the writing on the left hand side beam one can see a message from Missy proclaiming that she loves Ken. I promise that I did not write that or anything else on the bridge.
The side view of the bridge with the creek, bridge and tree reflections in the creek and the sandy shore line with the early fall foliage in the background was quite good.
The dim late day light required longer exposures, showing the motion in the clouds and probably blurring of the tree foliage moving in the wind.
Some of these images have embedded links to higher resolution images on Flickr. Viewing the images there will let one see more detail.
Until next time,
Ken
My third stop during my first day of photographing Putnam County covered bridges was the Rolling Stone Bridge.
This bridge got its name from a large boulder in the creek that moved, when the current was strong. That boulder was destroyed, as it was deemed a threat to the bridge.
Rolling Stone is a short, single span bridge in an attractive setting.
I shot multiple exposures of the inside, then combined those to create HDR images.
The engineering and construction of these bridges is remarkable. These were designed to last for many years, although these do require maintenance, mostly to the exterior, from time to time.
I was able to get down to the creek and shoot from several viewpoints along the creek shoreline.
More on Indiana covered bridges later,
Ken
The second stop during my first day of photographing covered bridges in Putnam County, Indiana was at the Pine Bluff Bridge.
The setting around Pine Bluff is more attractive than that around Cornstalk (see previous post) and this will be a great place to shoot, when the fall colors peak.
I found a way to get down to the creek, where I could walk along the edge of the creek and beneath the bridge to shoot it from both sides.
I experimented with the DxO Nik Selective Colorization of a monochrome image with a couple of the photographs taken of this bridge, bringing out the red color of the bridge after converting the images to monochrome.
The photo above is my favorite of this bridge with the curved road leading to it.
The final image here is looking back from near the bridge down the roadway leading to the bridge. I know this will be a great place to try to return to another time, when the fall colors are at their peak.
More on Indiana covered bridges to come,
Ken
