Book Reviews: Hiking Waterfalls in Georgia and South Carolina and Hiking Waterfalls in North Carolina

This year Donna and I have taken to finding and photographing waterfalls here in South Carolina. So far we've made at 3 trips to upstate South Carolina and thus far were able to find all of the waterfalls we tried to find except one and boy did we have an adventure on that hike! Along the way we've been doing some product testing which I'll reveal later this month but for now I wanted to write about a couple of new books we bought to help us with our waterfall quests.

Melissa Watson has written two guides that we bought: Hiking Waterfalls in North Carolina and Hiking Waterfalls in Georgia and South Carolina. At the bottom of this review are links for the books on Amazon. If you click on the link and buy a book I'll earn a little commission. So far I think I've earned enough to buy a lens cap but hey every penny helps! The guides list 35 waterfalls for Georgia and 18 for South Carolina and 113 for North Carolina which explains why it gets its own book. I'm a bit disappointed with the South Carolina coverage because we have over 30 waterfalls here in our state so the coverage is a bit light in my opinion. I do have to give the author credit though she personally has hiked to each of these waterfalls she has written about and has provides turn-by-turn directions, with mileage for making your way from the trail head to the base of the waterfall. She has included GPS coordinates for the trail head and waterfall. For each waterfall she includes a map with the track she took to get from the trailhead to the waterfall, height of the waterfall, her beauty rating for the waterfall, distance, difficulty rating, trail surface, approximate hiking time, blaze color to follow, county the waterfall is located in, contact information for the waterfall, and map information to use to look the waterfall up on topo maps. That's a lot of information!

I've compared her write up of some of the waterfalls Donna and I have already found and found her descriptions to be very accurate. My only complaints about the book are: (1) lack of coverage for South Carolina and (2) there's a few errors in the GPS coordinates that I've found. Fortunately I was able to discover the errors while entering the coordinates into my mapping software and not while out trying to find the waterfall. Fortunatly the errors are minor. In one case she listed the trailhead and waterfall with the same coordinates but the description says it's a 1 mile hike to get to the falls so obviously one of the coordinates is wrong. I've passed along the issues I've discovered to the publisher and author and received a brief response from the publisher and am waiting to hear back from one of them with the correct coordinates for one waterfall. Given the amount of information she provides and that I was only able to find a couple of mistakes I think she really put a lot of work into these guides.

Overall I'm very impressed with the guides and I'm sure they will get lots of use as Donna and I continue our waterfall quests. It'll be next spring before we get a chance to use the guide. I don't think we'll be doing any more waterfall hunts this year but you never know. If we get an unusually warm weekend we may head north west to upstate South Carolina and put the guide throuh a test. Once we've had a chance to use it in the field I'll post a follow up.

Below you'll find a list of the waterfalls listed in each of the guides.

Georgia Waterfalls
Ada-Hi	Amicalola	Anna Ruby	Becky Branch
Bull Cove (North Carolina)	Cane Creek	Crow Mountain Creek	Denton Branch
Desoto	Dick's Creek	Dukes Creek	Eastatoah
Falls #1 on Waters Creek	Falls #2 on Waters Creek	Falls on Deep Gap Branch (North Carolina)	Flat Branch
Helton Creek	Hemlock	High Shoals	Holcomb and Ammons
Horse Trough	Litle Rock Creek	Little ridge Creek	Martin Creek
Minnehaha	Panther Creek	Panther and Angel	Raven cliff
Sea Creek	Sliding Rock on Wildcat Creek	Stonewall	Sylvan Mill
Toccoa	Trahlyta	Waterfalls of Tullulah Gorge

North Carolina Waterfalls
Big Bradley	Big Laurel	Bridal Veil	Bridal Veil Falls in DuPont State Forest
Bubbling Spring Branch	Bull Cove	Camp Branch	Cascade Lake Dam
Cascades on the Cullasja RIver	Cathey's Creek	Cedar Rock Creek Falls and Falls on Grogan Creek	Chestnut
Connestee	Corn Mill Shoals in Dupont State Forset	Courthouse Falls	Crabtree
Cullasaja	Denton Branch (Georgia)	Dill	Douglas
Dry	Duggers Creek	Eastatoe	Elk River
Falls on Cove Creek, Little Sliding Rock, and Cove Creek Falls	Falls on Deep Gap Branch	Falls on Long Branch	Falls on Long Branch, Hendersonville Reservoir Dam, and Falls on Fletcher Creek
Falls on Tributary of State Rock Creek and Pound Pup Falls	Falls on the West Fork of the Pigeon River	French Broad, Mill Shoals, Rooster Tail, Lower Rooster ail, and Bird Rock
Glassmine	Glen	Glen Cannon	Granny Burrell and Frolictown
Grassy Creek	Greenland Creek	Harper Creek	Hickory Nut
Hidden and Window Falls in Hanging Rock State Park	High Falls on Mills River	High Falls on the Thompson River	High Shoals Falls in South Mountain State Park
Hooker Falls in Dupont State Forest	Hunt Fish	Hurricane	Jackson
John's Jump	Juneywhank	Key	Lake Powhatan Dam
Lake Sequoyah Dam	Laughing	Little Bradley	Looking Glass
Lower Cascades in Hanging Rock State Park	Lower Falls of Upper Creek	Lower Falls on the Little Beartrap Branch	Lower Satulah
Lower and Upper Linville	McGalliard	Merry	Midnight Hole and Mouse Creek
Mingo	Mooney	Moore Cove	Moravian
North Harper Creek	Paradise	Peason's	Picklesimer Rock House
Quarry	Ranger	Raven Rock	Roaring Fork
Rough Butt Creek	Rufus Morgan	Schoolhouse and Warden's	Second Falls at Graveyard Fields
Secret	Setrock Creek	Shunkawauken	Silver Run
Silvervale	Skinny Dip Hole	Slick Rock	Sliding Rock
Soco	South Harper Creek	Stone Mountain, Middle, and Lower Falls in Stone Mountain State Park	Tom's Branch and Indian Creek
Tory's Falls in Hanging Rock State Park	Toxaway	Triple, High, and Grassy Creek Falls in DuPont State Forest	Turley
Upper Bearwallow	Upper Cascades in Hanging Rock State Park	Upper Falls at Graveyard Fields	Upper Falls of Upper Creek
Upper Falls on Little Beartrap Branch and Falls on Big Beartrap Branch	Walker	Walking Stick	Waterfall off Moore's Springs Road in Hanging Rock State Park
Waterfall on Avery Creek and Twin Falls	Waterfall on Log Hollow Branch and Falls on Tributary of Big Bearpen Branch	Waterfall on Sam Branch and Wash Hollow
Waterfalls of the Horsepasture River: Rainbow, Turtleback, Drift and Stairway	White Owl	Whitewater and Laurel	Widow's Creek Falls in Stone Mountain State Park
Wilderness	Wintergreen Falls in DuPont State Forest	wildcat and Falls on Flat Laurel Creek

South Carolina Waterfalls
Brasstown	Bull Sluice	Cedar Creek	Chau Ram
Chauga Narrows	Fall Creek	Falls on Reedy Branch	Issaqueena
King Creek	Long Creek	Opossum Creek	Pigpen and Licklog
Raven Cliff	Spoon Auger	Station Cove	Twin Falls
Upper Sloan Bridge, Lower Sloan Bridge, and Hiker's Perel			Yellow Branch

Book Review: 100 Ways to take better Nature & Wildlife Photographs

I recently finsihed working my way through Guy Edwardes' 100 Ways to take better Nature & Wildlife Photographs and I learned a lot from it. Such as I need to buy more gear :).  The editors of this book were very smart to put the photo on the cover that they did. This is exactly the type of photo I want to take so as soon as I saw the cover I was sold. The book could have been complete rubbish and I still would have bought it. Fortunately the book is far from rubbish. The book is about 90% photo hints and tips and about 10% post processing which is fine with me. I probably underprocess my images but I'd rather spend my time out shooting than sitting behind a computer tweaking an image to the inth degree.

Here's some things I'll be adding to my equipment to buy list and reason for adding them:

1 - Small handheld mirror -- for checking my look, you know I want to look nice for the critters :). Seriously though this is so I can reflect light onto a subject if it's not evenly lit.

2 - Extension tubes -- to allow for closer focusing distances with telephoto lenses.

3 - Small foldable reflectors - to serve the same purpose as #1 but to do so with different lighting.

4 - 1.4x extender - to give me extra reach.  This is probably the first thing I will buy. I can use it with my EF-200 2.8 to give me an EF 280 f/4 which is pretty close to the 300mm focal length that's pretty popular for nature photography.

5 - Battery grip - I've used them with my Rebel XT, 40D and 5D and just need to buy one for the 7D.

I'm sure there's other things I'd like to add to the list but that's plenty for now :).

I really liked the format of the book. For each tip the author described it in detail and provided a photo sample that was taken using the tip. He also included exposure information for each photo included in the book. For me this is a big help. I realize that every shot is going to have its own unique requirements but being able to see what the photographer used to get that particular shot at least gives me a starting point to work from.

A couple of things I learned from it that I've been experimenting with include manually selecting a single focus point instead of using all 19 or any of the focus zones available on the 7D and to slow down and think about the shot before pressing the shutter. Sure I'll still use spray and pray for birds in flight but for static subjects I'm spending more time composing the shot than I have in the past. I suppose another lesson I learned is to just slow down, take it easy and enjoy the environment (which I'll admit can be tough to do when there's gnats or misquitos flying about).

Regarding the cover photo that sold me on the book. That's a Black-tailed Godwit and was photographed in Texel, Holland using a Canon 1DS, EF 500 with 1.4x extender. 1/500th at f/8, ISO 250.

Below is a link for the book on Amazon. If you use it to buy the book I'll earn a small commission and you'll learn 100 ways to improve your nature and wildlife photos.