A segment of Burney Falls. Its a quite large waterfall. Being so large, it is difficult to both capture its majesty and the beauty of the water cascading off the rocks.

I am writing this now as I clean up my supper at 10 p.m. – boiling water over a propane stove (the easiest way to get instant mashed potatoes off the walls of the saucepan).

Slowly, the stars are coming out (though the combination of looking at an LCD screen – even at the lowest level to preserve battery power and the neighbors four camp lights – at least its a warm color temperature with an even spectrum – the night before some other neighbors had some flashlight of some sort that was very bright blue that instantly killed anything resembling night vision).

{insert cleaning activities for a bit}

10:30 now, the pot is clean, as are the fork and the spoon and the spatula.  One pot cooking is a good thing, less to clean up.  It would be even less if I decided to just go with the freeze dried chicken BBQ (which was quite good, not as good as the honey mustard chicken last night, but much better than the various teriyaki dishes I’ve had before (note, if you are going for an asian based freeze dried meal, get some extra water chestnuts and bamboo shoots – they add some nice flavors without any trouble).  For brand, Natural High is a much better company (in my opinion) than Mountain House.  This is mostly from the simple bit of how much sodium is in a meal.  I realize that people eating these foods are often backpackers and do a good bit of sweating and need their electrolytes.  However, having a single pouch for two servings (which a single person cooking alone would eat) with each serving having 56% of the daily sodium intake is just too much.  Natural High tends to be around 20-30% for each serving – a fair bit better (though still…).

On the flip side, cooking and cleaning in the dark is challenging.  I probably should have gotten a propane lantern for myself.  I wasn’t quite silly enough to try to pack a set of hot lights and try setting those up for lighting while cooking.

One of the problems with writing outside, at night, in the woods is right now, there are five small bugs of various sorts crawling over the screen.  I dare not slap them, but its even more annoying than an active desktop with cats batting your icons around.

Even with my shot night vision from looking at this screen, I can see Jupiter up there.  Clearly the brightest object in the southern sky right now.  I know its Jupiter because last night, I was running Starry Night and verified that yes, that was jupiter.  (Go to Starry Night Sky chart – Lat 45º 0.8538′ N, Long 121º 39.05′ W, 10:45 p.m. July 5, 2007 for the date and time and look south)

Running down the battery last night wasn’t necessarily the best of ideas.  To recharge it, I plugged the laptop into the only publicly accessible power outlet – between the two sinks in the shower house.  I sat just outside the door with my laptop, loading the images from before into Aperture (I can’t find my spare card and filled up that one).

I’m staying in one of the cabins – they’ve just installed them – they have outlets, but no power (thus the recharging the laptop in the shower house).  They do have locking doors – this is a very good thing.  I much prefer having my camera equipment in a building with a dead-bolt than in a tent or even my car.  It gets a bit warm here in the summer – 105 F (thats 40.5 C for those on the other side of the pond).  Redding was up to 115 F.  That actually got me moderately worried (the propane canister says “store at a temperature less than 120 F” – I’m fairly sure its not that great for my film either).

Just before the third night up here, on my fourth visit (first was just a drive through, second was crashing at a friend’s hose in Redding, third was in a tent last July and this is the fourth) I’ve finally found the best time to photograph.

First instinct is to photograph when the sun is on the falls.  Spectacular contrast between the parts of the falls, with patches of sun dappled across the face of the falls.

This makes for very challenging photographs.  To get the exposure just right so that the background of the falls is reasonably light up without completely blowing out the highlights in the water.  This is the norm for many photographs – even the ones sold in the general store (big sweeping shots, with the center of main chutes of water completely blown out).

You can get around this be very carefully selecting the area to photograph – and with digital, chimp the exposure.  I had forgotten to turn on the highlight display on my review and when bringing them into aperture was a bit annoyed at how easy it was to trash the highlights in a way that was not recoverable at all.  Raw or not, those highlights were gone.

So, instead fighting the sun in the morning, just admit that it won.  Its certainly not a bad thing to go down to the falls.  I mentioned that 105F temperature in the camp – at the falls, its 65F (18C for those on the far side of the pond).

If you have a girlfriend, wife, or sherpa (bonus points if you have all three – even more bonus points if they are all the same person) consider packing a lunch (carrying all your camera gear and a tripod and a picnic lunch is quite a bit to tote) and maybe a board or card game and stay down there all day.

Then, just as the sun gets far enough down that the entire falls are in “shade”, you get a wonderful even lighting across them that is a joy to photograph in.  By 7 p.m., exposures of half a second or longer are trivial to get for a silky smooth appearance to the waterfall.  You can even attempt to get that all encompassing photograph.

What if you don’t want to spend the entire day down at the falls?  You can head out to the lake.  There’s trout fishing (though I’ve never seen anyone catch anything).  If you are up for a drive, about 45 minutes west or so is Mc Cloud falls (Upper, Middle and Lower – though with upper and lower you’ll probably have local teenagers in flying through the frame as they jump from rocks into the water).  A bit further west and then north a little is Mossbrae falls – while not a huge impressive fall, it is interesting in detail – I know two panoramic photographers who have won awards for photographing it).  And thats not even the half of them in the area.

One bit for those who like deserted ruins, at Ingot, there are two run down mines on the other side (looking it up on the GPS) Little Cow Creek.  I have no idea of the land rights, building status (probably condemned), nor how to actually get to the other side of the creek – but its there.

There is also Mt. Shasta itself which is very impressive – especially with the right sunset (though that precludes the photograph of the waterfall as the sun sets), maybe for an early bird go catch it with the sun rise.  There is a nice vista point along Highway 97 that is worth a shot from.  There is also a lavender farm somewhere along 97 – lavender in the foreground, Shasta in the background.

For accommodations, I recommend staying in the park.  The reason is simple – assuming no road construction on 299 (Ha! – three of the four trips here, I’ve hit road construction on 299… I’m sure it will be nice when it is done, but that assumes that it gets done sometime), its a one hour drive to Redding.  This means getting up early and/or getting back late.

Back to equipment.  As much as I like rectangular filters, I am seriously considering the Singh-Ray vari-ND filters.  The reason being that its a bit more fiddliy to keep shuffling filters – slide in the 0.3 density, add in the 0.6, hmm swap the 0.6 with an 0.9, etc… All of this handling of filters and extra surfaces (add three filters and you’ve got 6x more glass-air surfaces – thats almost as many as are found in a lens).  The vari-nd filter would have four surfaces – but I feel a bit better with a bayonet filter with a nice ring that is harder to break and harder to get finger prints on too.  Something to consider.

In general, a polarizer is needed for photographing waterfalls.  The reason for this is that the rocks have a significant amount of glare.  If you want, you can completely cut that off with the filter.  Rainbows are also polarized, though I’m not sure at what angle compared to the glare.