Price’s Falls at Falls Creek Conference Center, near Davis, OK
I’m working on a digital guide and cheat sheet that I’ll be posting to my site soon. However, I should have probably read my own checklist prior to packing for this special outing! I accidentally left my ND filter at home. (Not the thing do do if you’re planning on shooting long exposure waterfalls!)
Jeremy Smith (one of my best friends and huge supporter of my photography) and I took a weekend in early May to set out on a hiking adventure. “Guy time” as we called it. The weather for our chosen weekend was lots of rain. It looked like the first round my pass by lunch time, so we decided to make a slight detour on our drive to the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge and stop off at one of our favorite places: Falls Creek. We had both attended several Men’s Boot Camps there, based on the life-changing book by John Eldredge, “Wild At Heart”. On those hills, in the company of great men, God spoke to us, each on a personal level. It really was like a spiritual boot camp for the heart, to re-align your passion and heart to God and realize you have a battle to fight, a beauty to rescue and an adventure to live. (more on that later…)
Any opportunity I have to visit Falls Creek is always welcome, and because of the recent and frequent downpours we’d had this spring, the “low road” leading to the entrance of Falls Creek unveiled an awesome surprise. Price’s Falls is one of the first things you see when entering this special place—and I was excited to see the abundance of water powering over the falls and nearly flooding the banks of Falls Creek.
I had JUST purchased (impulsively) a pair of waterproof, snake proof, basically everything proof knee-high hunting boots, which I immediately tested out with the first shin-deep plunge into the stream. Good to go. Pretty quickly I found a composition I liked and set up my tripod. Admittedly, even with my massive Robus 8880 tripod, the water was so swift, I had to fight for solid footing among the uneven creek bed rocks.
Also, I must note that I knew I wanted to compose for a multi-frame panorama, so the trick is visualizing the 3D space in front of you in a 2D plane as it will be presented in your composition. I knew I had a strong edge stopping point on the right of the frame, but not really a clear foreground anchor object. The rock in the middle of the stream appeared much closer to me in person, but the scene shrinks it in the pano.
The conditions for this shot were EPIC! The rain had stopped, but everything was still soaking wet. The wind had calmed and the trees were still. But there were TWO MISTAKES I MADE HERE:
I looked in my bag for my ND filter and it wasn’t there. I had left it in another bag at home. Thus forcing me to shoot at F22, and use the Low 1.0 ISO on my camera. Potentially introducing diffraction and softening the sharpness of the final photo.
I grossly underestimated the power of the falls to create its own wind. I didn’t notice until I got home, in post processing that the foliage on the center rock was blowing a good bit from the “water wind” and during my 1.6 second exposure they became severely blurred.
Can you believe that the waterfall created enough wind to blow the leaves like this? I couldn’t either.
I was crushed. I almost loved the shot. The composition was almost working for me. Of course the falls are beautiful no matter what, but I can’t say how much this mistake ate at me. Being a sort of Photoshop Guru can save you from time to time, and I didn’t hesitate to “fix it” in Photoshop with some creative cloning:
Borrowing information from other images in my set was a viable solution. Always shoot multiple exposures and shutter speeds from the same tripod position in situations like this. (More on that in the next post!)
I ended up with an ok image, but not one I’d want to add to my official print gallery. I wanted everything sharp! So what else is there to do but, you guessed it…go back to Falls Creek!
(Check out Price’s Falls part 2 for the “re-do” of this image.)