05/25/16 Six Finger Falls on Falling Water Creek–Featured Arkansas Landscape Photography

A late springtime view of six finger falls on falling water creek.

Taken in two frames with a Phase One IQ100 and Phase One 35mm LS lens, raw files developed in Capture One, panorama stitching in Lightroom.

We had driven up to 6 finger falls to attempt a night shoot, which did not work out due to the clouds that rolled in, however during the sunset, the light did allow for a wonderful series of photographs.  I love to get down low on the creek, below the falls and attempt to grab some short pans, as the normal medium format of 4:3 does not allow for very much to work with.  I am not a big fan of cropping out the center of a shot to get to a pano, as you loose so much image in the process.

Normally, I would have used my rail to get a nodal solution, but I had forgotten it.  Using the Arca D4 geared head, it was easy enough to get level for each shot, then go back to Lightroom to let it work it’s magic on the panorama.  Lightroom with the new panorama feature does a great job on single row stitching and now they have added a feature called boundary warp, which really does a great job.  In the past, I had always used software like Ptgui or Kolor’s panorama software, to get a cylindrical solution, as I am panning with a wide lens, (the 35mm in medium format is equivalent to about 22mm with a 35mm camera), still not that wide.  The 35mm LS has a pretty good hyper focal range by F11 and I took this at F14.  Due to the subject range and distance, I was not worried about losing details to diffraction.

For these shots, I used both a circular polarizer and a Neutral Density filter.  The polarizer was from B+W and the ND filter from HiTech, (their new Firecrest line).  This allowed exposure times of around 1 sec, at an ISO of 50.  There was little to no wind blowing so I was able to get away with just two exposures.

The addition of the boundary warp in Lightroom has really made this type of photography more fun and much quicker to get to a solution.