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Bells Canyon Waterfall
This HDR panorama was created with twelve images, four sets of three.
It had been four years since I’d been to this location, which is strange considering what a magical destination it is, and how close it is. The trailhead is a twenty minute drive, and the hike is about an hour up, if I don’t get too caught up in the scenery along the way. I think it’d been that long because the last time I was there, in June 2006, I made such a beautiful image (first image in my Wasatch Mountains Gallery, “Bells Waterfall”).
In 2006, I was there at exactly the right time, what I considered the peak seasonal climax for this location; shortly before the Summer Solstice, at sunset, on a night when the setting sun wasn’t obscured by clouds. At this time of year the water is really flowing from spring snowmelt, and the sun, near its northern terminus, strikes the waterfall and granite towers at sunset, but leaves the canyon between in shade. This effect helps to simplify the image and really sets off that crimson sunlit water falling.
I think that was keeping me away, the thought that I wouldn’t be able to create a more successful image. Not that this image necessarily achieves that goal, it does show the same location in a new way and it makes me realize my previous image is not the final word on this place, it has much more to offer. The peak seasonal climax isn’t the only time you can make a compelling image of such a dynamic place. Later in the year, lower water flow allows a closer approach, and shows the underlying structure of the falls.
I am actually kind of surprised this worked so well, given the serious technical challenges that needed to be overcome. This is the second time I’ve used this technique in a stitched vertical panorama, where I’ve used different exposures for the sky and the landscape. This time, however, the difference in brightness between sky and land was too extreme; when I attempted PS photomerge with the best single exposures for each section, it failed. I decided to try to bring the exposures more in line with each other by using Photomatix to generate four HDR images (all tone-mapped with the same tone compressor settings). At this point I was worried about how the water would be rendered because I was combining exposures with different shutter speeds, which had a huge impact on how the water movement looked from one image to the next. In each of the bottom three images Photomatix does a fine job of creating a final image that seems to favor the softer look of the longest exposure without any objectionable ghosting from the shorter exposures.
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