Here’s a shot of Canyon Falls in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I shot this as part of a day long trip that consisted of Canyon Falls, O Kun de Kun Falls & Lake of the Clouds.

Location

As far as UP waterfalls go, Canyon falls is sort of sitting off in its own area a ways away from some of the other falls with it being about 40 minutes away from Agate & Bond falls. The park lot has plenty of parking when you arrive. After that it’s moderate hike to the falls. One thing I would recommend is to bring some tall waterproof boots along so that you can cross the Sturgeon river. If you’re not able to cross the river, you will be pretty much limited to the shot I took.

When I was there, I believe I had my knee high rubber boots but they were so muddy from my hike earlier that day that I just wore my regular hiking boots.

Composition

Like I mentioned before, this is basically the only shot you can get of the falls unless you cross the river. My biggest challenge with getting this shot was that there were so many people to contend with. Most of them families with cell phones. I didn’t want to stand in people’s way as I took my pictures so my first challenge was clearing the queue of people behind me. What I did was since I looked like a ‘photographer’ with a big camera, I just offered to take people’s family pictures for them, that way they would leave quicker and I’d have more time to myself to take pictures without worrying that I was in someone’s way. I did this for 3 groups of people one after another until I finally had 5 minutes alone.

I’ve often considered paying people to get out of the way too, but have never resorted to doing that. In fact when I was at Agate falls, that was how I lost my wallet was because I brought it with me in case I’d have to pay someone to move along, haha.

When taking this picture, I tried my best to get as much of the falls in the frame by not obscuring them from the rock cliff on the left. At the same time, I wanted to include some of the rock cliff in the foreground.

Post Processing

I’ll admit, this image is highly post processed from the original.  My edits to it were on and off over three sessions over a couple months. The first thing I did was run it through Photomatix to even everything out. After that I made a ton of local adjustments in Adobe Lightroom. In my last session, I did some more structural tweaks to the image like stretching the whole image a little taller. I also applied my newly adopted ‘heavy vignette’ that I started doing after my Pewitt’s Nest photos with waterfalls.

The last thing I did, was something that I learned from watching the Ted Gore video series and that was to think of the photo in layers and make structural changes to each section. I was never happy with the original sky in this photo so I decided to take some creative liberties and hide more of it with the trees. With this, I made a layer for the trees, stretched them taller and then masked them into the other shot therefore hiding more of the sky. This type of stuff, while maybe not true to the scene is something I’ll probably do more of as it seems Ted Gore is doing it in all of his tutorial videos.

Software Used

Lightroom

Photomatix

Photoshop

Techniques Used

Focus Stacking

High-Dynamic-Range

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