Valley Falls State Park – a local favorite

Valley Falls is a relatively quiet park about 7 miles south of exit 137 on the I79 near Fairmont, West Virginia. Popular for picnics, walks, weddings (and funerals), it is also just a fantastic spot to just stroll around and watch the water. I’ve seen it at various levels of water – from overpowering torrents of water down the river to much more graceful individual waterfalls. So what will you see if you visit?

Well, not this on every visit! This is one of my favorites of the location, taken in October 2021 on a perfect morning. For the photographers among you, this was assembled from 42 individual photos from my drone, 3 rows of 4 or 5 shots (for the sky, the middle and the lower parts of the river) with 3 individual exposures at different exposures taken in each location. Why on earth?? Well, firstly the contrast is pretty high – the sun is very bright, the shadowed rocks are pretty dark and a camera can’t really capture all that detail, so three different exposures help capture all that information. Then, one shot can’t capture the full width of the scene, unless you go further back in which case the composition changes. So sticking to one spot in the sky and rotating around gives you the feeling of really being there and being able to look around. Stitch them all together to make one lovely image that can be printed up to 84 x 44 inches. Imagine the impact that a metal print of that size would make on your wall! You can read more about the process involved in making this photograph in this story.

I took another view of the waterfalls from a position that was more over the river itself. I printed this panorama and submitted it to the Morgantown Art Association annual competition and was very pleased to win first prize in the Photography section! Prints of this one is available in the gallery for sale if you are ever in Morgantown.

I’m not sure which one I prefer! At first it was the wider view, but now I’m not so sure. My wife preferred the second one and so that is the one that was printed!

By the way, you can listen to this article while you look at the photos. Might be more interesting than reading?

But enough on technique – what else is there?

The river itself – the Tygart Valley River is wide and calm just above the falls themselves:

Turn round and you start to see the falls themselves. This is a relatively low water flow for the area, and I’ll come back to that later:

And then with a complete turn, we can look down the river away from the falls themselves:

And finally, a full view into the distance showing all the fall colors at their best:

And for something different, a video flying towards and over the falls:

I’m always intrigued by waterfalls and how best to photograph them. All the shots above were from a drone with a fast shutter speed – there is no big tripod in the sky to hold the camera steady for several seconds and so the water is sharply captured and very intense. From the ground with my camera firmly on a tripod, you can play with the effect of a slow shutter speed on the water itself. Of course the rocks are sharp, but the water becomes increasingly dreamy:

This was with a 1 second exposure – long enough to smooth most of the water, but still showing some texture in the smaller falls. Gives a very different impression of the waterfall, I think.

I also noticed a smaller flow of water through a frame of autumn trees as I was walking about. Gives a nice contrast to these wider views of the entire scene:

Details are always intriguing – anyone see the head and mouth of a turtle in this one?

But what does it look like when the river is approaching flood stage? I visited in November 2017 and although the leaves had vanished at this point, the water was completely overflowing the ledge of rock that you can see in the image above. Instead of separate and relatively small falls, there was just one mass of water cascading down the river:

No sign of the turtle’s head here! I was fascinated by the power of the water and challenged myself to try to capture that power. For the technically minded, I had a special filter on the lens that can alter the colors of reflections, so a reflection off the water surface can be changed to gold, or perhaps blue to suggest reflections of fall trees, for instance. This image has an abstract quality that I really liked:

And I’ve always been partial to this vertical format showing a log hanging on for dear life in the flow of water in the main waterfall:

Just going through the images to create this story has brought back interesting memories for me – my resolution – to visit this great park more often and through the seasons. Perhaps snow on the rocks will be next!

UPDATE: I did visit the park again in April 2024 to see the waterfall in the springtime – a lovely visit, as you can see in this article.

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