Weekend Side-trip to Healey Falls
This past holiday long weekend, we took a side trip to a place called Healey Falls. An impressively wide waterfall with a stepped limestone bed, it's a little dry this time of year, but one section was definitely worth photographing. The exposed limestone in itself presented some great opportunities to work with my wide angle lens.
It also gave me an opportunity to test out the LO-ISO settings on my D750. Basically, I get two "unofficial" lower than advertised ISO settings LO-1 and LO-2, which effectively reduce my ISO to as low as 50, rather than the standard 100. This is rather handy on a bright sunny day, when I only have a polarizer for my 28-300mm lens, and none for my Rokinon 14mm. Every frame here (except the iPhone image) were exposed at LO-2 (ISO 50).
I spent some time pulling in the shadow detail as well; in Lightroom, using both local and global adjustments. The scene was VERY high contrast, but the RAW captures I made managed to retain quite a bit of shadow information.
This is the one iPhone shot I included as it gives a decent panoramic view of the entire waterfall.
Two-frame HDR, merged in Lightroom.
LO-2 (ISO 50) setting, with a polarizer.
Negative Clarity setting to create a dreamlike feel.
Going for that dreamy infrared look...
I have always wanted to capture one of those misty waterfall shots. Not the kind full of blurred, rushing water - I like those and can capture them easily enough - but the more subtle shots, where it's thin strands or rivulets of water dripping down. For that reason alone, this is probably my favorite image. Combined with a customized infrared preset, I'm very pleased with the look and mood of this image.
Two-image panoramic, stitched in Lightroom.