I’ve always wanted to visit Tahquamenon Falls State Park, but unfortunately they’re 5 hours away from where I live which means I wouldn’t get to spend much time at them during a day trip. Instead I made a trip up to Munising, MI and stayed a few nights there to photograph the fall colors and I made sure Tahquamenon Falls was on my places to visit during this trip.

Location

There’s two distinct areas of Tahquamenon Falls State Park. The upper and lower falls. The lower falls are kinda boring and the falls you see in all the pictures are the upper falls. It seems like most people go to the lower falls first mistakenly as that seems like the official entrance to the park and they must assume that’s where the more famous falls are. Once at the upper falls there are several vantage points to see them. Many have some tree limbs in the way so if you’re short on time, I recommend going down the steps to the base of the falls as that offers the best view and is where I took my pictures from. Once there go to the far left as that offers the best view of the face of the falls.

Make sure to bring a tripod, ND filters and a wide angle lens (16mm). I’m always surprised how many people have giant DSLR cameras at waterfalls but have none of those pieces of equipment.

Composition

I arrived just at sunrise which worried me as I usually try to get to places before that. Fortunately the best time to shoot the falls is for about 10 minutes after the sun rises above the tree line and illuminates the face of the falls with nice diffused light like you see in my picture. I was trying to get a shot that showed both the falls and the river beyond. For many of the shots I tried to keep the sun out of the frame, but for this one I kept it in and took a wide spread of bracketed shots. In this case, I used the following: -6ev,-3ev,-2ev,0,+2ev+3ev.

I also played around with different shutter speeds. A lot of times I like to take different speeds for the face of the falls and the water below and then blend the two later. The face needs to be shorter or else it loses definition while the water below should be longer or it gets too distracting. For this particular one, since I had so many bracketed shots, I just used the same for all. For this one, I believe I used my 3-stop ND filter and a Polarizer for it which resulted in a 1.6 second exposure.

Post Processing

For post processing, I used Aurora HDR which is a new piece of software I recently purchased. It was just released for Windows. In the past I would have used Photomatix. I’ve noticed sometimes Photomatix gives me weird blue colors in the shadows. The nice thing with Aurora HDR is it gives me a lot more sliders to use while doing the HDR aspect. Often times I just leave it at the default though and then do everything else in Lightroom which is what I did here. Really all I’m after is a evenly exposed image where the highlights aren’t blown out and the shadows are still visible. I’m not really after that super clarity looking HDR look when taking the photo out of any HDR software. Usually the photo looks pretty boring at this point which is fine.

In Lightroom I made a bunch of changes like contrast, color and sharpening. I use a lot of adjustment brushes as well to give more emphasis to different areas of the photo like the falls and trees.

After that I sent the photo over to Photoshop and added an Orton Effect using the Raya Pro panel. This is something I’ve been doing a lot more of lately. It seems like what the pro guys like Ted Gore do. It seems counter-intuitive to purposefully make your image less sharp (as that’s what people in message boards obsess over) but it actually does help the image look better. I applied the effect to the grass in the front and some of the distant objects. I find it’s really nice to add to leaves in waterfall images. If they look too sharp it becomes very distracting looking at them.

Overall, it’s an image I’m really proud of and I’m happy I made the long trip up north to see the falls!

Software Used

Aurora HDR

Lightroom

Photoshop

Raya Pro

Techniques Used

High-Dynamic-Range

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