12/29/15 Featured Arkansas Landscape Photography–Foggy Morning View from Roark Bluff

Foggy Morning View from Roark Bluff on the Buffalo River

PLEASE NOTE:  All of the photography of this website is the property of www.photosofarkansas.com and is copy right protected.  Do not copy any of the images on this site to paste on Facebook, Pintrest, or any other website without the permission of Paul Caldwell.  Years of time have gone into capturing these photographs, please respect that.  I do not take copy right infringement lightly.  If you have a need to display any of my work on your site ASK me before you Copy & Paste.

Taken with a Canon 5D MKII, Canon 24-70mm Lens, ISO 400 to 800 bracketed, and exposure bracketed in 5 separate exposures. 

The early morning hours on the Buffalo tend to be some of the best to photograph the river.  I love to hike up to the summit of one of the river bluffs and then wait for the morning fog to lift over the river.  However sometimes the best shots are taken in the fog as this one was.

On this morning, I was setup to catch the fog rising and wanted to keep my lens out of the sun, so I was aiming westward.  During the long morning wait I went back to my pack to get a drink and just happened to see this shot, as the sun was starting to break through the fog.  I was barely able to run back to the camera, grab my camera/tripod and catch this shot.

I took this image in 5 exposure and ISO brackets since I knew that the Canon camera would not allow me the dynamic range to capture it in one shot.  The Canon 1ds MKII, as good as it was for the time @ 16MP was pretty terrible with shadow recovery.  Most the shots I took during this time were all in exposure brackets.  Still the sun coming through the fog has always been a hard part of the shot to get just right.  I did not want to the bright orb of the sun to just break through the shot, but instead I wanted it to just barely show.  Many of the HDR software tools at the time would not allow for this, and I ended up having to do a manual bracketing exposure.  Since then I have re-worked this shot many times over the years and but still have come back to my early versions as my preference.

This photograph has been printed up to sizes of 40 x 60 and has been selected by several Hospitals and offices in Arkansas to be placed in their permanent collections.