For some reason, I’d never noticed Hillsborough River State Park until fellow Photography Interest Group member JT Smith asked me about it – thanks JT!  There are a lot of photos of the park on Flickr, many of them quite nice.  So I decided to go over on a scouting trip.  Flickr’s a great place to research new locations and I spent a while going through their search results as well as Google maps before my trip.

Dark river in the deep woods.  A Hoya 8 2/3 stop neutral density filter let me stretch my exposure time to 25 seconds at f/8 and ISO 100 to smooth the water surface.

The park is about 20 miles north-east of Tampa and an hour and 40 minutes west of where I live.  Not too long a trip.  With all the rain we’ve had recently,  added water’s made the current look pretty fast through the rapids.  My kayak would get a few scrapes paddling through this.

Hillsborough River rapids.  I’m a sucker for Cypress Knees and it was a treat to find some by the rapids to use as foreground.  Since the wind was blowing a bit, I made two exposures.  A slow one (30 seconds with the ND filter), and another not so slow one (no filter, 1/13th second).  To eliminate the blurred leaves, I combined them in Photoshop using layers and masking the first for the water and second for the foliage.

I want to see what this looks like when we haven’t had so much rain.  I think a few more exposed rocks would be nice.  Here’s one last image from the trip:

Hillsborough River.  This is an Infrared, false color, three exposure panorama.  This place is near the kayak put-in.

I’m going to make a return trip and bring my kayak.  I think I’ll paddle the parts in the first and third photos and not the second.

Thanks for stopping by and reading my blog. Now – go make some photos!

And if you know of a good photo photo-op in Central Florida – please let me know.  I love to explore new places.

©2013, Ed Rosack. All rights reserved.