Revisiting trip to Clifty Falls State Park, Madison and Scottsburg, Indiana

Several posts ago, I mentioned a project I've been working on involving a revisit of a previous shoot. I didn't identify the shoot then, but I'm presenting the results in today's post. 

The shoot occurred Feb. 17, 2011, and it entailed a morning and early afternoon swing through southern Indiana. Specifically, there were brief visits to Clifty Falls State Park, then to the nearby city of Madison, and, on the ride home, photographing the Scott County Courthouse in Scottsburg. 

The shoot, which came on a heavily overcast day, was one of my earliest experiments with high-dynamic range (HDR) processing. I wasn't entirely pleased with those early results, but the HDR processing technology I used then has changed over the years, so I wanted to see if I could come up with pictures with which I was more pleased. 

For those not acquainted, HDR photography is a way to enrich and introduce detail into compositions by taking multiple shots of the same scene using slightly different exposures in each frame. Most who indulge in HDR, including myself, use three exposures -- one at the metered exposure, and one each at a level above and below the metered exposure. The objective is to pull in optimum key (bright) and shadow (dark) detail in the final composition once all the frames are melded into a single image in post-processing. Photomatix is the software I use to do that. 

HDR was designed primarily to help photographers cull optimum detail in compositions where there was unavoidable contrasting light -- extreme lights and extreme darks, situations you'd find almost exclusively outdoors. And Feb. 17, 2011, was anything but that. As I mentioned above, it was heavily overcast. 

But in the years since, some photographers (myself included) used it in order to 1) get better detail regardless of light circumstances and 2) make colors more vibrant -- but without the resultant image looking like the colors were pulled from a clown suit. Or, as a member of a photo club I belonged to Indy termed it, "clown vomit."    

When I first started with HDR, the Photomatix software available at the time did not handle movement in an image very well, especially if a photographer wanted to freeze action. 

So back then, when I processed my shots of the ship traffic on the Ohio River at Madison, I begrudgingly settled for unwanted movement by river vessels in my processed images. I also wasn't entirely pleased with the coloring I ended up with in the originally processed images. That aspect could have been partly or even entirely my unfamiliarity with the tools Photomatix gave me to work with. 

In the years since then, updated versions of Photomatix have addressed the movement issue significantly. The software also had added new treatment options that made me happier about the final pictures, including and especially the color. 

So I recently reloaded the original RAW images from that 2011 shoot onto my desktop PC and reprocessed the whole batch of compositions I took in 2011. My findings from that experience are as follows:

1) Indeed, the current version of Photomatix I use (6.2.1) enables me to deal with the action movement much better than it did back in 2011. I froze -- to full satisfaction -- every one of the images that had disappointed me in 2011. 

2) This is the surprising one: The coloring did not change a whole lot, but I have learned through the years how to better control it, so I'm a little happier with the color in the reprocessed images.  

Almost all the images I had processed in 2011 were pushed through Photomatix's "Detail Enhancer" processing option. In the years since then, I've steered away from that option because more often than not it leaves the final image looking too surreal and/or unrealistic. My preferred treatment options today are "Contrast Optimizer" and "Tone Balancer." 

But throughout almost the entire recent reprocessing task, I ended up appreciating the "Detail Enhancer" option at least for those 2011 images involving clouds, which were those along the Ohio River in Madison and those taken by the elevated overview in Clifty Fall State Park. "Detail Enhancer" gave me much more satisfactory detail than "Contrast Optimizer" or "Tone Balancer." 

Compare the images in the link in this sentence (which takes you to the 2011 blog post where I presented the original images) to those in this post. Hopefully, you'll see what I mean. There will be a few with different crops, and in one case, I used a different set of photos but it's essentially the same scene.

Above and below: At Clifty Falls State Park, a look down and up different sets of rock-based stairs. These are the more tame ones I came across in the park. The most dramatic gradients -- and extremely difficult to traverse -- were near the one waterfall (Hoffman) that I tried to reach. But I stopped short of getting there; I was lugging a lot of gear, including a tripod, and the radical-elevation steps on some climbs were getting too cumbersome. 

Above and next three below: These shots were taken from the Observation Tower in the southern portion of the park, near the Clifty Inn, a visitors lodge on the park grounds. Above is the Ohio River looking upstream, or east.

Above: A vista that, on this day, proved much more striking when viewing after HDR treatment than what I remember seeing with the naked eye. I captured this less than an hour after sunrise. On the other hand, this vista must be breathtaking in the heart of autumn ... and perhaps even in summer. 

Above: Including smokestacks from the Indiana-Kentucky Electric Co. in a river overlook from the Observation Tower.

Above: This vista of the river looks west, with State Road 56 curving into the horizon on the right. The one disappointment I had in the Observation Tower is that those trees on the left block a clear view of what would have been a gorgeous vista.  

Above: A view across the river from the Lily Overlook.  

Above: I actually preferred the original version over this, although this one is a bit sharper. This frame comes along one of the hiking paths and illustrates one of the dramatic gradients. 

The photo above and next several below were taken along the river banks on the Indiana side in Madison. The view above looks west.  

In the original of this coal-carrying barge above, I cropped a lot of the water out of the version I used in the post. I left more water in this time. 

Above: I liked this composition, looking west again, for the waves lapping the shoreline. 

Above: I'd seen this barge move downstream without the cargo auxiliary about 15 minutes earlier. It not was pushing the unloaded piece upstream. I waited to frame the vessel immediately between the two beams in the foreground. The same vessel is below only farther upstream (east), not far from the bridge.

I definitely prefer the new-processed version of this shot of a couple gentlemen relaxing on a bench in the park along the river. The photo lacks the color clutter of the original, and the crop is slightly different as well. 

Above: A monument not far from the Jefferson County Courthouse in Madison. 

Above: The downtown merchants' district of Madison is filled with many colors to the various structures. The architecture dates to the 19th century. 

Above: I enjoy photographing county and federal courthouses, and this is the Jefferson County Courthouse. I just happened to get there during a period when contractors were giving the structure a facelift, hence the fence in the foreground.  

The Scott County Courthouse in Scottsburg has an interesting front, back and east side. A gazebo (above) is situated on the back side, the white rails juxtaposed with red brick (first photo below) can be found on the east side, and an extensive war memorial (second below) devoted to soldiers who served in all of the county's major conflicts dating to the Civil War can be found on the front side.