Here’s a long exposure I took at the Potato River Falls near Gurney, Wisconsin. These are one of the bigger falls in Wisconsin and are sized similar to Michigan’s Bond Falls. Surprisingly, not many people seem to visit these falls which I suspect is because they aren’t a state park.

Location

The Potato River Falls are about a 25 minute drive from Ironwood which is a great place to start if you’re looking to check out a lot of waterfalls in the area. Access to the falls requires a drive down a mile or so gravel road so prepared to have your car get a little dirty. Once there, you’re presented with a couple paths. The path on the left will take you to the smaller, upper falls. There’s technically two sets of falls over that way. Both of these falls have pretty heavy flow and because of that, don’t make for very good long exposure photography.

The falls that you typically see in the pictures as well as mine are the much larger lower falls. Take the path on the right to access these. On the way down the trail there’s an old damaged overlook that a tree took out as well as a very very steep cliff. Ignore this area. Head down some steps and keep going. Eventually you’ll come to a nice overlook. At this overlook, you still can’t see the falls the best so now it’s time to get off the trail a bit.

I came prepared with a 50ft rope that I tied around a tree and then used to scale the cliff walking backwards. The cliff is only about 10-15 feet tall and isn’t straight down. You could probably slide down it, but then you’d have to find a way to get up again.

Depending on the conditions you might not need the rope, but I find it helps me get to tough places. Another thing you might want to bring are some rubber boots or in my case, dry pants (made for kayaking). You’ll need to cross the river to get to an island and from there hop across some rocks to finally get to the base of the falls. With my dry pants I can just walk through the river the entire way there. The dry pants also allow me to try out pretty much any composition I want without having to worry about getting wet.

Composition

Once I was setup and had my gear sitting on some small rock islands, I started looking for compositions. One thing that helps with waterfalls is to observe where the white foam is flowing. Wherever this flows, with a long exposure you can get some nice leading lines which is what I did. I also used a polarizer to allow the water in the foreground to be clear and expose the rocks below. The sun was starting to get low in the sky which lit up the face of the falls nicely. After awhile the sun dipped below the tree line and started casting a green tint on the falls. At this point I decided to leave. I pretty much had the place to myself other than a couple who sat at the top of the falls for a little while.

Post Processing

For post processing I took my 3 bracketed exposures and sent them to Aurora HDR which is my new go to HDR processing program. After that I sent the photo to Photoshop and added an orton effect to the trees in the background. After that, I brought it back to Lightroom and did my typical process adding adjustment brushes to different areas to add more contrast and color changes.

Overall, I’m happy with how my Potato River Falls photos turned out especially after having issues even finding the falls the first time I went there. Thanks for reading!

Software Used

Aurora HDR

Lightroom

Photoshop

Techniques Used

High-Dynamic-Range

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