Abiqua Falls - First visit

ZBlack

I went to Abiqua Falls in Oregon for the first time. It is so beautiful, it's crazy. The hike in was a bit rough, but absolutely worth it. I can't wait to go back during winter or spring when the water level is a lot higher. The roads and trails there will require a 4 wheel drive or ATV though I imagine. Easily the most beautiful location I've been to here in Oregon and well worth the more difficult than average hike (if you go hiking to falls and stuff in more remote areas, this may not be to bad). There were some ropes in the steeper sections to help as well.

Here's a couple of my favorites, and you can find the rest of the album here. I would love critiques, praises, suggestions, anything is more than welcome. Let me know which your favorites are too, even if they aren't of the 4 here.

It was nice having most of the area shaded so I could take longer exposures for the water without an ND filter, but I was unable to keep the sky the deep blue that it was. Some of the images have some exposure blending to even it out a bit, and others are minimal edits in lightroom.

Wiren

Arrrgh, I have been trying to get there for quite some time. Long drive and family commitments make this a hard trip to make. Very nice images, I wonder how they would have turned out if you had used a GND filter. I am just going to have to get there very soon. Thanks for the nice images.

ZBlack

Having a GND would have been great I imagine. The only filter I have at all is a 2 stop ND and it's a screw on style. Definitely on my short list of must have accessories. The skies are what I wish I could have captured much better.

It's worth the trip whenever you get a chance!

JC

I didn't even know these falls existed. Add something else to my bucket list. Very nice shots.

My laptop monitor is pretty bright, it's the one thing I can't seem to get constant across my different screens when I calibrate them, so these images seem a little bright to me, it seems like you made judicious use of exposure blending, I would probably have left a few more shadows in.

Single image exposure blending? or did you stack multiple images? If you've got a tripod, I think it's just as easy to take two shots to replicate what a graduated neutral density filter would do.

ZBlack

These were on a tripod, 3 bracket exposures 2 stops apart. I just used the built in bracketing on my camera. After the fact, I'm thinking in a scenario like this, the dark exposure I need to do manually so I can stop it down further yet. They are definitely bright on my primary screen, but my editing screen they look decent to my eye, but I'm still very much learning the whole art of editing and color calibration so I love to ehar feedback on it all. I'll try some more edits with less "evening of the exposure" and see how those turn out. It was probably mid 80's temperature wise without a single cloud in the sky. Sun was upper right when facing the falls, and was a very beautiful blue, but you can't see that in any of my photos haha.

So you're thinking have more shadows, or darken the ones that are there now so they are more apparent? I'll have to look a bit closer at the originals before blending too. Thanks for the feedback!

You should definitely go. It's just beauty at it's finest if you ask me.

JC

ZBlack wrote: »

These were on a tripod, 3 bracket exposures 2 stops apart. I just used the built in bracketing on my camera. After the fact, I'm thinking in a scenario like this, the dark exposure I need to do manually so I can stop it down further yet. They are definitely bright on my primary screen, but my editing screen they look decent to my eye, but I'm still very much learning the whole art of editing and color calibration so I love to ehar feedback on it all. I'll try some more edits with less "evening of the exposure" and see how those turn out. It was probably mid 80's temperature wise without a single cloud in the sky. Sun was upper right when facing the falls, and was a very beautiful blue, but you can't see that in any of my photos haha.

So you're thinking have more shadows, or darken the ones that are there now so they are more apparent? I'll have to look a bit closer at the originals before blending too. Thanks for the feedback!

You should definitely go. It's just beauty at it's finest if you ask me.

Did you shoot raw? If you want to duplicate a ND filter, take your darkest exposure and dial down the exposure on that one, or move the levels to darken the image. Open up that image, and your final image as layers. Add a mask to the sky image, and make the mask a gradient from opaque at the top to transparent at some point in the rocks. This will also darken the trees at the top as well, just like a grad ND filter would. If you want to spend a lot of time, you can tailer the mask edge to the trees, this gets hard because the edge of the trees are light from the sky around, but if you only try add a partial amount of the darker sky back in, say 30% or so, you should be able to get a realistic edge going there. I find that doing it by hand is often better than just using exposure blending, or local contrast enhancement.


For the shadows, I'd just add in a little bit more of the shadow I think must have been in the originals, just to add a little bit more depth to the images. At, least, that is what I would do.

ZBlack

I'm definitely not very good in photoshop, so masking around the trees and such sounds a bit out of my league for now. I'll definitely give the other stuff a try this weekend and see how they turn out. Thank you

JC

ZBlack wrote: »

I'm definitely not very good in photoshop, so masking around the trees and such sounds a bit out of my league for now. I'll definitely give the other stuff a try this weekend and see how they turn out. Thank you

only way to get good at it is to jump in and give it a try.

make the gradient mask layer, then using the air brush (I'm trying to be as general as possible, since i use gimp) with a soft brush, and draw in some translucency in the mask in the trees and the irregular edge of the rocks where you don't like how the mask overlaps. Good thing about mask layers, you aren't messing with the original layers.

Others might be able to jump in with advice about adjustment layers, I know they exist, I don't have them in gimp, other than masks.

best would be to get it all perfect in camera. Honestly, the sky isn't so bad, but if you can't live with it, or want to try to replicate what your eye could see, yeah, play around with it. You can probably get good results with just two layers, a gradient mask, and the sky layer on top at around 30 percent opacity.

spacefuzz

columnar basalt. I am definitely going to have to go there.....

kdog

Sorry, I'm a bit behind. These are spectacular. This place needs to go on my bucket list for sure. Awesome post.