My son and I visited Platte River State Park for the first time this week. There was a photo of a waterfall that had shown up on a screen saver and he really wanted to see one. Since this is fairly close, we decided to drive there to see. Not having been there myself, I really didn't know what to expect. I had viewed others photos of the falls, but you can't really get an idea until your actually there yourself. I decided to take my camera along to grab a couple practice shots. If the time works, I think I may go back and try some other stuff. The photos are two little fall leading up to the bigger falls. The little ones, as you can see, are only about 6 inches tall. There wasn't a whole lot of water rushing over them since we haven't received much rain in the last month. It provided just enough for some nice blur.
We hiked down to the river bed following the trails that had been there for some time and stood in the river bed that was now a nice sand bar. Since it was mid day, the sun was coming through the trees pretty directly, so it made capturing the shadows under the falls tough while trying not to blow out the highlights of the lighter areas. Cameras cannot capture the same type of dynamic range as the human eye, so you have to really compensate for that. Post production software, such as Lightroom, help quite a bit when confronted with this situation. I moved in closer to try and avoid the harsh light. I used f/13 to get a longer shutter speed to blur the water but it wasn't enough. I had to use a 6 stop neutral density filter along with a Circular Polarizer (2 stops) to get the timer to between 45 and 60 seconds. In total, I had 8 stops of light between the ND and CPL. The last shot was taken at 65 seconds. As always, click on the photo to view it larger on my website.
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