Blue Ridge Rapids

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Beautiful shot. Can you share the location?

Jane--The location is absolutely top-secret and I refuse to give it away...ok, I'm teasing! :) This is Looking Glass Falls in Asheville, NC, just off of the Blue Ridge Parkway a few miles. If you ever get over to the east coast get one of the many books on waterfalls of the Blue Ridge/Virginia/North Carolina--there are some great photo opportunities. Thanks for stopping by and leaving your thoughts...they are much appreciated!

here's an honest critique, and it is merely an opinion. take it as you will. this is a beautiful image, but i think it could have been done better. i feel like their are 2 subjects in this photo. the main falls and the small cascade in the foreground. they both seem like equal stature to me. i think that you need to accentuate one or the other. either get lower and make that cascade stick out in the foreground. or use a telephoto and make the main falls bigger. maybe even get closer to the next cascade closer to the falls. i'm always a big fan of wide angle in landscapes so that's what i would do. get close to that little cascade nice and close, wide angle, get low. like i said this is merely and opinion. best of luck to you.

 

Cheers

Josh--Thanks for you input. I definitely see what you are saying. To be honest, this was a snapshot location when I was traveling so I'm pleased I got anything even this nice. I will definitely be visiting it again in the future. What you can't see right here is that I'm standing on a slippery rock in my suede shoes in the dead of winter when it was so cold I could barely press the shutter release! I plan to head back during the summer when I can get in the water and set up exactly how I want. Getting closer to the falls would be tough--even this far away the spray was so bad that I only got a couple pictures that weren't completely ruined by water spots on my lens. I definitely like the idea of getting lower and focusing on the foreground and will do that. I didn't whip out the telephoto because I was in a hurry but would also love to do that to isolate the bigger falls. Also, the area above the large fall was so bright (probably about 6 or 7 stops) that it was nearly impossible to get a decent exposure with the opening above the falls included. Thanks again for your input and thoughts--thoughtful critiques are always helpful, regardless of whether or not I agree (and I do agree with you for the most part). Take a look at the same folder this image came from, there are several other compositions that may be closer to what you have in mind.

While I agree, in the main, with Josh's excellent critique; I think that there's another option for this shot too. First, let me say that this is your best effort of the bunch for this particular waterfall. I like this a lot! For this image, you might try and crop up from the bottom to just below the little riffle in the foreground; leaving about one-half of the longer diagonal red rock on the left. This gives the illusion of the water pouring out of the bottom. It makes a nearly square format, but seems to balance the centered main fall. When you go back, be careful and try and eliminate that patch of empty sky to the left of the top of the fall; it will always be an exposure issue. It looks like a shift to the left side might take care of that. Keep up the good work, Tyler; your work is really looking great these days. Cheers! Chris

The shadows around falls do much to obscure the rocks and diminish depth of scene there. Water is too dark preventing good visual of foreground and area up to base of falls. Good you cropped part of boulder on right.

 

My sense is this would be better if 3 shots were taken and stitched: falls, middle area up to base of falls and foreground; each with their respective exposures.

 

I have uploaded a version (and much better than the last one I made of this).

Chris--Thanks for the suggestions and comments. As you know, I value your opinion and appreciate you helping me improve.

 

Frank--I feel very fortunate to have you follow some of my work and offer your suggestions. I admire your work tremendously and your critiques are priceless. You are always hold no punches when evaluating work which some may not like but I love. It's helpful to know when someone admires your work, but even more helpful when someone as respected and expert as yourself tells you how the image could be improved. So, thanks for this and all your many comments. With that said, your edit of this shot is one of the best I've seen. You made tremendous improvements. I shot it with a polarizer and the only thing I did was to add some saturation. What you did made the scene much closer to how it really appeared--it looks like a fall in the middle of winter in your edit. If you don't mind, would you please share a couple details about how you did that? I'm still playing with PS and (very) slowly learning how to improve my work. Once again, thanks for your interest in my work and your dedication to helping me improve--it is much appreciated!

My first impression here is three separate shots to be photo merged.

Also, if you can ALWAYS shot RAW images; jpegs are compressed and degrade each time you open or edit them. In RAW mode you have exactly what your digital sensor captured, a kind of digital negative, with much more post processing potential.

 

Ok, for this image use photo shop; create a copy of this as a background layer; go to image->adjustments-> shadow and highlight; play around on the background layer copy with the shadow and highlight sliders; find what you like and blend the layer with background. Also, I would save the saturation until after you have the tonal corrections completed; I think that may be a problem with the reds in the rocks in the river restricting tonal range. Here I did some simple tonal contrast adjustments and a high pass filter sharpen, 4.5px hard light blended at 40% opacity, which helps with depth and highlight contrast. Since the image was an edited jpeg, I could not retrieve original tonality, but was able to get some back.

 

You can also use selective levels and curves, which automatically create adjustment layers; rocks around falls is a good place for that technique -- don't do no stinking dodging there.

Frank--Thanks again! As always, your responses are most helpful! Just so you know, I always shoot in RAW and always bracket my exposures, generally pretty widely. For this shot, I have 4 stops total of bracketing (this is the middle, camera metered exposure). Although I don't know everything about photoshop yet, I'm thinking ahead and bracketing everything so when I do learn more, I have the RAW files to go back to and do my blending. Thanks for all your help--I do appreciate it!

You might want to get a book -- Real World Photoshop.