Today I finally was able to visit Charleston Falls Preserve in Tipp City Ohio.  I’ve been meaning to visit for a couple of years – but Tipp City is North of town and I don’t get up that way that often.  I found out about Charleston Falls Reserve while researching area waterfalls – there just aren’t that many waterfalls in the Dayton Ohio area.  But I knew that I’d be in the North Dayton area today for a BMW Car Club event and decided I’d visit the Preserve to get photos of the waterfall.

Prior to the trip, I researched everything I could about photographing the falls with ChatGPT.  ChatGPT recommended the best time to photograph the falls (sunrise), the best shooting positions, best lens to use…. I genuinely thought I knew everything I needed in order to get some great photos of the falls.

This morning I got up at 6am, got ready, and drove up to Tipp City.  I got to the Preserve at about 7:30am and started hiking with my camera gear toward the falls.

I reached the walkway that leads down to falls:

Finally…I reached the falls.  The light was perfect.  I knew exactly where I wanted to shoot from and I had all the right gear.  However, there was just one problem – there was no waterfall:

I would later learn from one of the locals that was walking in the Reserve that water only runs over the falls after a really hard rainfall and typically not any time after Spring.  A little fact that the Charleston Falls Reserve website fails to mention, as did ChatGPT.

Undaunted by the waterless waterfall, I decided my course of action.  I was not about to let a little thing like no waterfall determine me from creating the waterfall images that I could see so clearly in my mind‘s eye.  With the use of a little generative AI I was able to create the images that I was looking for in Photoshop:

I also got a few nice Fall photos within the Reserve :

I made the most of a bad situation – and despite everything that happened as well as everything that didn’t, I wouldn’t dissuade you, the reader, from visiting the reserve.  But they really need to update that website description with some reasonable caveats.