While I’d visited Watkins Glen State Park in central NY while growing up there, it was always before I was active in photography, and after moving away from the state in 1990, I’d had it in the back of my head to return and do some serious photography there. The chance came during a visit in 2006, a day that turned out to be overcast and faintly drizzly. Moreover, I had flown up and was unable to take a tripod with me, so couldn’t pursue the type of fartsy blurred water shots that I wanted to. I really didn’t shoot a lot during that trip, though I made attempt to put together some decent compositions as I went – at least one other may sneak in during these Sunday posts. For this one, I framed the blossoms of an unidentified flowering tree against what little view of the river that I had.
This is one of the problems with visiting scenic areas and landmarks for the purpose of photography. Often, you have a narrow time period to work within, and may simply not get the conditions that will allow for great photos – the weather or lighting may not cooperate, or the foliage is less than optimal, or the crowds prevent decent views, and so on. Ideally, you want to time your trip for the best conditions you can achieve, and then spend several days or even a few weeks in the vicinity to be able to work with variety in weather and times of day and so on. But that’s pretty hard to arrange, and unless you can sell the resulting images for hundreds of dollars, also hard to justify. So most of us have to settle for having a fair amount of luck, and there wasn’t much with me that day. I ended up shooting a lot more when I visited the wildlife refuge on a different day during that visit.