Behind The Image Blog #06- Landscape photography | Cascadia state park, OR.
Cascadia state park, or.- Blog #06
Once upon a time, I visited an epic waterfall. I had the entire place to myself, shot for over an hour, framed some killer compositions, and believe it or not, skipped all the way home with an enormous grin on my face, filled with excitement because of the brilliant images that were sitting on my SD card waiting to be processed. Surprisingly enough, that happened. Well maybe… Just replace the skipping with driving, and add the part where I imported over 20 unusable, completely underexposed images into Lightroom. Yeah, now that sounds more like reality.
{ Thankfully after finding out the problem, I can blame the camera for the images being underexposed, it wasn’t me... If you shoot Sony and don’t know what the DRO setting is, and yours is set to automatic. TURN IT OFF! I’ll explain later in this blog why it’s there, and a resource on how to disable it. My Sony A7RIII is still pretty new to me, and I had no idea about this setting; clearly. }
The Story
This week's blog features a little waterfall here in Oregon just off of Highway 20, located in the trails of Cascadia State Park. This place is epic, and I can’t believe I got to shoot this beautiful scene with nobody else around. A short and painless hike takes you to the base of the falls, full of lush colors, and rugged rock-scapes. As I arrived at this scene I saw an abundant amount of composition opportunities, so I got to shooting. For each photograph I framed up, I shot 3 additional images moving my focus point around so I could then focus stack in post-production to ensure that I had sharp and crisp detail throughout the entire image. Like always I made sure I dialed in my exposure, exposing for both the highlights and shadows without blowing out either; which is especially crucial in waterfall photography. Everything looked fantastic through the playback on the LCD screen, and I was ready to make my way back so I could post-process all of the images. Stoked, I packed up all my gear, and away I went.
Now, this is when things get interesting. I backed up the images to my hard drive and then imported the folder into my Lightroom catalog. As I flipped through the images, I didn’t know what the hell was going on. Photo after photo, completely under-exposed, with the histogram giving me nightmares. At this point I was confused. I shoved the SD card back into my camera and looked at the photos through the playback. They looked and read perfectly exposed…” WTF?”. This is when I headed straight for the internet, because well, it knows just about everything. I came across a video by Nick Page, in which he talks about the DRO setting in Sony cameras and him running into the same problem as I did. He then showed how to turn the damn thing off. THANK GOD. DRO is short for Dynamic Range Optimizer, It’s essentially Sony's in-camera HDR feature. It lifts the shadows so your JPGs have more dynamic range. I shoot all of my images in RAW format, so why would this affect RAW files? It doesn't at all, but the preview on the back of the camera after you shoot an image is a JPEG preview, which is why I was seeing a perfectly exposed photograph through playback in the camera.
Great, now it won’t happen again, but could I trash an entire morning of what could have been epic images? No chance. I flipped through the photos again, 1 by 1 carefully inspecting them to see if they could be saved in any way. Eventually, I came across 3 photos all with the same composition, just with a shift in focus so I could stack them in post. The light must have slightly changed when I shot this particular image because it had the potential to be saved. Still, a little more under-exposed than I prefer, but with a 42MP sensor, and Sony’s large RAW files I knew that I could lift the exposure on the image without too many consequences. The landscape photography gods were truly with me on this one.
The IMAGE
Alright, enough of all the backstory. Let me explain and run through this composition. With this scene, I enjoyed the main falls, but I was particularly interested in the spillover that occurred where the boulder is, right at the base. With waterfalls similar to these, I tend to go further downstream to see if I can find an engaging foreground of flowing water to catch your eye, but also act as a leading line that directs your attention upstream to the main subject. In this case, I shot low, and I mean low. I spotted some wonderful mossy and rugged rocks further down the way that I thought might work well as a dynamic element to the foreground. I framed it up so there was a rock on each side of the foreground to provide balance as well structure. I also found a little dip in the creek that the stream dropped off so I could capture some faster-moving water to add depth to the bottom portion of the composition. Another one of my observations was the large moss-covered boulders that caught some brilliant ambient light that added a beautiful glow to the edges, providing dimension to the photograph. Something I enjoy about this composition is how the water zig zags throughout the scene. It comes in at a slight angle towards the right, then drops off towards the left at the boulder, and then makes its way back towards the right in the foreground. Overall I'm quite happy with this photograph. Even though there are a few details that bother me, I couldn't be more grateful to have gotten an image after everything that went sideways with this shoot.
Hope you all enjoyed this one!
Image setting
Gear used to photograph THIS image:
Feedback is always welcome, the comment section is open!
Until next week, happy photographing!
Thanks for reading,
Alec
