Here’s a shot of the well known falls at Pewit’s Nest State Natural area. This is probably my second favorite composition for this area that I took, the first being the more traditional angle at the top of the rock cliffs.

Location

For this shot of Pewit’s Nest, I stood at the bottom of the hill and further downstream from the last of the three falls. During my research of the location, most of the photos I saw were at the top of the cliffs, but I did see a few from this same spot. It’s a pretty great angle as the rock ledges create sort of window to view the falls tucked away in the middle of them creating this ‘secret hidden falls’ look.

I think this would be a pretty easy shot to forget about if a person were just walking around the place without having done some research before coming. That’s one important aspect of landscape photography is doing some research ahead of time before you drive 2 hours to a place. Sure, it’s a bit of being a copy-cat, but I find many photographers before me have done a lot of the dirty work finding good angles. I always try to make sure to get some shots from established points of view first, then after that, explore the area more to see if I can come up with something original. Ultimately, that’s the point of landscape photography is to inspire others to go somewhere and try to see what you saw when you were there.

Composition

To get this shot, I stood in the creek with my rain boots on and my tripod placed in the water. I had to shift back and forth a bit to line it up just right. I wanted to make sure I got enough of the rock ledges AND the falls at the same time. This was one of the rare photos that I maxed out my reach on my 16-35mm lens opting for 35mm. I had to crop it a bit as well so I imagine a 55mm lens would work even better. Like my other Pewit’s Nest shot, I believe I only used my polarizer here and not a ND filter as it was already pretty dark out and I was average 8-10 second exposures already.

Post Processing

The post processing I did with this shot follows a recent waterfall trend of mine which is making the images very dark and contrasty. Parts of the image should be totally underexposed and solid black. The falls, of course, should be properly exposed and standout from the rest.

As far as workflow goes, I ran this through Photomatix. This time using a different process than I usually use. I used the painterly 1 process this time, as opposed to my normal balanced process. I found the balanced process was underexposing the top half of the image too much and I wanted it more even.

After that I processed my focus stacked foreground the same way and then blended the two in Photoshop. After that I did the rest of the changes in Lightroom. I should make a note that I played around with Google’s Nik Collection for this image too after watching a video of Elia Locardi using it on Fstoppers. At the end, I opted not to use it as it wasn’t giving me the look I wanted to use for this particular image. Finally I wrapped up the editing in Lightroom.

Software Used

Lightroom

Photomatix

Photoshop

Techniques Used

Focus Stacking

High-Dynamic-Range

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