Here’s a shot from my visit to O Kun de Kun Falls last fall. This was part of a day trip I made to Lake of the Clouds & Canyon Falls as well as O Kun de Kun Falls. This was my first time visiting the falls, as I was going to visit them a previous time but lost my wallet at Agate Falls and had to end the trip early.

Location

O Kun de Kun Falls are located another 15-20 minutes north of Agate Falls & Bond Falls. Most people visit Bond Falls and a few more go to Agate Falls, but I’m betting even fewer make their way to O Kun de Kun Falls. Probably the biggest reason I imagine is it’s a 1+ mile hike to the falls. When I visited it had just rained and the trail was really muddy. I was slipping and sliding the entire mile hike. One thing to remember while hiking is there’s actually an upper and lower falls. When I first heard the upper falls, I thought they might be the actual falls, but I had read online that another hiker fell for this and missed the lower falls entirely so I hiked on. I was able to spend maybe 2 hours at the falls alone (which is really unusual for me when visiting waterfalls) as I arrived in the parking lot not too long after sunrise. I wanted to get to the falls before the sun got too high in the sky, otherwise it would cast harsh highlights and shadows on the falls from the surrounding trees. Another reason to always visit waterfalls on an overcast day.

Composition

For this particular shot, I had finished taking 90% of my shots for the day and this was sort of an after thought. I had crossed the bridge over the river to see what was on the other side. I was delighted to see a nice ‘window’ on the rock ledge the falls flow over. Right away I knew this was going to be a good composition to shoot from. At the time other hikers were arriving so I was trying to get the shot before I had to deal with people.

For this shot, I actually took three different shots. I took my first series of bracketed shots at -2, 0 & +2 while focusing on the background. I did this again for the rocks in front of me for the foreground. Finally, I took one more set of bracketed shots at a quicker shutter speed for the water in the falls.

Post Processing

The first this I did was was run my 9 photos through Photomatix. This type of composition requires this as there’s just too much dynamic range to show everything at once. Otherwise you can’t really expose for the dark rock ledge and background. I did this for my foreground stack, background stack and finally the falls stack.

Next up, I took these three tiff files and blended them in Photoshop, first focus stacking the foreground and background. After that I blended in the faster shutter speed of the falls. If I hadn’t done this, the falls would just be a giant white wall of water and wouldn’t have much detail. The fact that I took this shot at all was probably an accident when I was at the falls, but when I started processing the shot I was excited that I had done this. Something I will consider in the future as I like to have a little detail in the wall of the falls, but prefer the water below to be a longer exposure.

After this, I brought the photo back into Lightroom and did my usual tweaks. I made heavy use of adjustment layers to give emphasis to different areas of the photo. Total editing time might of been maybe 6-10 hours over the course of a couple weeks.

Software Used

Lightroom

Photomatix

Photoshop

Techniques Used

Focus Stacking

High-Dynamic-Range

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