I’ve always loved waterfalls and with all the water that’s fallen from the sky this spring, the water falling from the rocks has been spectacular. I tried taking photos of them in the past with film, but I just didn’t do it enough to become proficient. The lag time between shooting and developing film and seeing mistakes and remembering them and correcting them the next time out was too arduous for me. I’d rather just go play golf with its instant feedback. But with a digital camera I can shoot, check out the LCD, spin some dials, push some buttons and try again until I get something I like.
Now, I’m not disappointed with the exposure, but a lot of times I’m disappointed with the composition. I did like the composition on this shot of the underside of the Glory Hole near Fallsville in the Ozark National Forest.
I’ve gone kind of goofy on photographing the waterfalls. I bought the Tim Ernst waterfall guidebook and I’ve been mapping out what falls I want to see before they dry up this year. Gina, Abby and I went out Saturday looking for King’s River Falls and it was a total bust. It was sunny and we were out too early in the day. Abby got grouchy after 3 hours of riding around, which meant Gina was grouchy and I was grouchy. After all that we didn’t even get to see King’s River Falls because the road was too washed out for Gina’s Honda Accord to navigate.
Comments
That’s a really interesting exposure. Is that reflected light illuminating the underside of the rock?
That is mostly the magic of Photoshop CS3, my friend. The light was pretty bad, coming in from the side and hitting part of the water coming down and of course it was dark under the overhang. My Photoshop skills were pretty rudimentary, learned on the job at newspapers before my Log Cabin days, so I bought the Scott Kelby book “7-Point System for CS3” and downloaded a free trial of the software. The book shows how to use the smart filters, layer masks, blending modes, LAB color, multi-process RAW and such. I used those techniques to open up the shadows under the overhang and juiced the colors with the LAB mode. I guess it’s cheating, but otherwise I would have had to do the Strobist thing and use flashes to light the underside of the rock. I was pretty impressed with myself to pull something decent out after seeing what I was getting on the LCD on the camera.