Steelhead Falls Basin

I was just here last Wednesday but I never actually climbed down to the bottom of the falls before. It was pretty slippery but worth the climb. The last time I was here I got some OK shots from above but I didn't really get the sharpness out of the leaves etc that I would have liked due to wind (and lack of realizing it at that moment)… So, this time I made sure to get some faster shutter speeds to blend in to my focus/blending stack… This meant higher ISO for those faster shutter speeds.

 

But the big thing for me on this image, was revisiting the Ted Gore tutorials that I purchased a while back. I won’t lie, the first time I watched, it was a bit over my head, and wasn’t really conducive to my workflow… I actually brushed it off and forgot about them.

 

But out of curiosity, I decided to re-watch them and I was surprised at how much easier I picked things up this time…I guess a few extra months of Photoshop experience helps ;-). I seemed to grasp things better now and had an easier time trying some of Teds techniques. Obviously I have miles and miles to go, but this is a step in a very exciting direction for me.

 

In the end, this was a number of images blended together. I had a series of 5 or 6 images, solely for focus stacking of the foreground. I then used another image for the water (as the focus stacking makes it a little choppy), and lastly, I used an image with a higher ISO to freeze the leaves blowing in the wind. This was blended in sparingly, only for really blurry areas of the leaves.

Done