Motif: A Fall in Fall I (REPOST)

[Raven Falls]

North Falls, Silver Falls State Park (Oregon)
Sony A-100
Sigma 10-20mm @ 17mm
6s @ f/22
ISO 100
CP

[Jens Peermann]

Wonderful scene and fantastic colors. I know you had a good reason to put the object on top of the frame, but I find it too distracting.

[Greg Russell]

A beautiful falls indeed. Love the composition and point of view, too. I agree that you should crop some of the top...that rock is distracting.

[Raven Falls]

Wonderful scene and fantastic colors. I know you had a good reason to put the object on top of the frame, but I find it too distracting.

Just for reference, the "object" is the ceiling of the cavern behind the fall where this is taken. I tried various crops, but needed to keep the place where the water emerges, and any tighter crops that only left part of the "ceiling" in the frame on one side seemed to me even more distracting.

[John Labrenz]

looks like an interesting place to visit.
Neat perspective...the top is somewhat distracting, but from your explanation...I now understand what it is.
Nice colors, although I sense a slight cyan cast in the water.

[RServranckx]

Nice colors and comp... I think that the image could use a little more sharpening though.

[E.J. Peiker]

I also like framing falls from behind them as you did but the trick to making it work is to kiss it with just a touch of flash. that way you don't have this uneven negative space frame that doesn't look quite right. So just take the flash at about 25% power and point it up at an angle and then these pictures come to life.

[Raven Falls]

I thought of using fill-flash -- unfortunately, at the time I thought of it, I was directly behind the fall, and my flash unit was a couple hundred miles away at home. The only flash I had was the on-camera variety, and that, obviously, couldn't be tilted up; as a matter of fact, its angle of view would have provided illumination to the air a few feet of me dead center, while precisely failing to light the inside of the cavern.

There actually is a little bit of detail in the ceiling, which might be better seen in a larger image. I did try double-processing the file and manually blending-in the "ceiling," but, try as I may, the best result I got made it look like really bad HDR. Personally, I think the near-black looks better!

[Raven Falls]

By the way, here's a different crop to remove some of the cavern "ceiling."

[Kari Post]

Could be a bit sharper, although Ireally like the comp and colors.

Suggestion: Avoid shooting at f/22. Even though you may get more DOF, the diffraction issues of shooting at such a small aperture often result in a less sharp image. In a scene like this, f/16 would have worked fine. If you don't feel comfortable giving up some DOF or are unsure of how much you need for a given scene, shoot the same scene at both f/16 and f/22 (or even intermediate apertures) and choose which one works best later. Also be sure to focus about 1/3 of the way into the scene to get the most out of your DOF.