It had been almost a month since I was last at Yates Mill Pond Park, so I made a point to stop there Sunday to do my 2-mile walk ... then went an extra three-fourths of another mile to encircle the pond on the mile-loop, a familiar trail in my early days of visiting the park.
The lead-off photo is an HDR software enhancement of a single iPhone 13 Pro image I took during my visit. So that you can understand why I explored the HDR version, simply check out the first image below, which is the original, unedited image. Look how dark the waterfall detail is.
I tried to temper the blue in the enhancement, which Photomatix software allows, but the consequences are one of those “one for all” things. If I tinker with blue color, it affects all blues in an image. There’s no way to isolate it in just one portion of the frame. So if I lower the saturation in the waterfall, I lose the natural blue in the sky. You can see how much sky blue I lost in the lead-off photo with just a slight tinker.
While I took a lot of shots of the falls, thankfully, it wasn’t the sole subject of my shoot. There were geese close to the pedestrian bridge, AKA pond boardwalk, and turtles resting on logs near the shore along the one-mile loop. The turtle shots didn’t turn out too well because I was shooting into back light. But I did get a few nice shots of geese.
There also were interesting tree/wood formations. A lot of new fallen lumber was evident in the forest housing the two-mile trail, and even though it had been a while since I was last on the one-mile trail, there seemed to be a lot of new fallen trunks and branches there, too.
The first shot below is an edit-enhanced version of a network of branches, limbs and trunks near the shore along the one-mile loop trail. The photo immediately below it is the original version for comparison. And below that is a version from standing a little further back than the ones immediately below.
In the first images below, you see some of the geese closeups. The first shows two, one busy in the water, the other serving as lookout. As far as the lookout was concerned, I apparently stuck around too long for comfort this close, so the lookout start honking and slowly swam away from the other (and me), eventually sticking out its long neck while honking outs its alerts.
Below the geese is my best turtle shot of the day, and below that is a series of shots reflecting a curious rust-color in the water near the shoreline, something I'd never seen before. The last shot of that series contains a short piece of driftwood on which a couple turtles are resting.
The last time I was at the park, the driftwood in the above photo had been populated by multiple birds each and every day I was there. Today, there was this solitary fowl. The image kind of looks like a monochrome, but it it isn't. I think it was just the time of day and how the sun was falling on that portion of the pond.
Next up below are a couple more striking tree branch and limb shots followed by shots of the mill itself, which on this day was being used by a photographer as a backdrop to shoot pictures of a woman decked out in a stylish dress. It look like she was wearing some kind of crown, too. I’m presuming the shooter checked in with Yates Mill staff and paid his required professional photographer’s fee before doing the shoot. A few close shots of the photo subject appear after the long shots of the mill.
I’ve never really pursued a shot of the far left end of the falls as you see above, so I include this. I decided to treat this one in Photoshop Elements to see if the shadows slider there would give me some detail on the darker elements on the far right, and it helped. The right portion of the wall was much darker before I pulled it up in PE.
I pulled off on a short path to the park’s field classroom (first photo below). I hadn’t photographed it a long while. Below that are shots of new pedestrian paver paths leading to the mill and waterfall when the clay path ends.
The post ends below with a shot of the spring azalea bushes in bloom.
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