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| Johannesbachklamm 16mm, 30 sec, F16, ISO 100 |
I cannot find those great deep autumn colours those weeks. We have entered into October on our calendar, at least the one in front of me, and still everything is more or less green. Leaves are falling and falling and still things are green. Wherever I go I look for colours of Autumn and to me it has not waken up yet fully. I keep visiting different places with trees and nothing ends up as planned. One, two weeks I hope. At the most. Then it will be only few days and all will be over for this year, snow will come and all will change. Gosh, I need to get new winter tyres this month.
Anyway, today in search of autumn I decided to visit Johannesbachklamm (gorge) by Würflach (Schneeberg Land, Niederösterreich) not far from Hohe Wand, one of my favourite locations around Vienna. The gorge itself is approximately 1 km long and 60m deep.
In principle I was after deep reds and yellows and water streams with floating fallen leaves. I got streams, rocks, greens in quite good quantities but reds and yellows are still not there, at least not as much as I wished for. I went shooting during midday and this was another reason to head into woods to kill sunlight above me. Shadows from trees even during midday can create nice atmosphere and produce good soft diffused light. So in the end I should not complain.
This was my first visit to Johannesbachklamm and I also treated it as opportunity to scout the area for potential future shooting location. Was expecting a bit more water with stronger current and some waterfalls. Not much now. Maybe in spring. In the end it is not that far - 60+ kilometres, so I will come again here in near future.
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| Johannesbachklamm 16mm, 20 sec, F16, ISO 50 |
On the other hand it is very good spot for simple afternoon walk without any steep hiking, no hassle at all and especially during the week it is quite deserted, so good time to photograph. In most of the places water level can be reached quite easily. Over all I spent there quite few hours simply enjoying the silence and woods around and quiet sound of slow running waters. Quite relaxing.
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| Johannesbachklamm 135mm, 3 minutes, F32, ISO 200, manual focus set to 10 metres |
And of course took few snaps. Used two lenses today - my favourite 16-35mm, mainly at 16mm focal length and also few times mounted 70-200mm and played with perspective compression with lengths between 140-200mm with F32. Some results are quite interesting especially when you know physically the place and realize the distances between the rocks and stones and then on the pictures everything seems so close to each other. Yes, longer focal lengths are quite good for landscapes and narrow gorges.
As to filters - a must have and use - polarizer, when there is water and reflections, you must play with polarizer. Reflections is one thing but polarizers also add a bit of extra saturation. From time to time I also used (on top of polarizer) reds enhancer. In some case it had good effect and in some no... in 2 weeks will be of better use.
Shadows, quite closed aperture between F16 and F32 (to get maximum depth of field) with low ISO of 50-100 forced shutter speeds from 10 seconds up to 2 minutes in some cases, especially towards late afternoon.
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| Johannesbachklamm 140mm, 120 sec, F32, ISO100 |
There are different polarizers but generally they take around 2 stops of light. You can get special ones that take only one, but with the tripod I do not really care. However in some shots where water flows I with I could have had shorter exposure times (now looking at the pictures...) i.e I should have gone down from 30 seconds all the way to 2-3 seconds - that is about 5 stops. Well, I could have pumped up ISO... but I did not.
Few more pictures are in the gallery on my site - Waterfalls and Gorges
Overall, good relaxing afternoon in the woods.
Highly recommended.
Tomorrow, baseball game in the evening under flood lights - high ISO challenge....
Cheers
Jerzy
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