Neal Grosskopf
Miners Falls, Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore
Before & After
Miners Falls are an impressive 40-50 foot falls up near Munising, MI. The falls were quite busy when I was there in June but most people didn’t venture down to the river level as the gorge down was pretty steep. You can get an alright look at them from the overlook but they looked much cooler down at the river level.
Location
Munising has 10+ falls in the area so if you’re into waterfalls, I’d highly recommend visiting. The only other places with such dense waterfalls in the region would be Iron River, MI and the North Shore of MN.
Composition
My original plan when I arrived at the overlook was to take a picture straight on at the river level with the falls in front. There was a large group of people who had the courage to go down the gorge to get to the bottom and they were covered in spray from the falls. I came to the conclusion that this was going to soak my camera in water if I took a shot from this position. Once I got down there I decided to go downstream a little ways where it was completely void of spray from the falls. I found some rocks poking out of the water in front of me to use foreground subjects. I jumped over a few rocks to perch myself in the river but on top of a rock and I took a set of 3 bracketed shots at a -2ev spread. I had to move my camera to the left a bit to keep the people out of the picture which is why the falls are so far on the right.
EXIF Information
Post Processing
I’ll admit, this photo is highly post processed as you can see in the before and after photo. At several points, I was going to give up on it but I forged ahead and I’m really happy with the outcome, especially with how the falls turned out as they look really smooth and bright compared to my original shot.
I first ran the shot through Photomatix. After that I exported that file to Photoshop and did some manually blending of the exposures as Photomatix was still blowing some highlights out on me. After that I have about 100 edits in my Lightroom history for the file.
Software Used
- Lightroom
- Photomatix
- Photoshop
Techniques Used
- High-Dynamic-Range