08/21/16 Featured Arkansas Landscape Photography–Storm Clouds over Buffalo Point, Buffalo National River Arkansas

The Buffalo River at Buffalo Point in early August with a morning storm rolling in.

Taken with a Phase One IQ100 and Phase One XF/35LS lens, at ISO 100, F12 for 1/40 of a second on tripod, single exposure.

This was taken back in early August 2016 on the Buffalo River in Northwest Arkansas.  This part of the river is known as Buffalo Point, and is one of the more popular spots on the river.  It features one of the larger campgrounds on the Buffalo along with hundreds of miles of hiking trails.  Within 9 miles of Buffalo Point, you can driver over to Rush Arkansas which is an old mining town which dates back to around 1917.  There is not much left standing at Rush, but it still offers some nice hiking.

This image shows just how fast conditions can change.  I walked down to the river before sunrise.  This particular bluff is on the east side of the river, thus will not get any sunlight until mid day.  It’s a great spot to catch a sunset if the clouds lineup, but you also can expect to find hundreds of people wandering around the beach which just add confusion to both the scene and water.  On this morning I was hoping to catch the area to myself, and for about a magic 40 minutes I had just that.  There was almost no wind blowing, so I also was able to get a very nice reflection of the bluff.  This bluff is about 80 feet tall and the face about 35 feet or so and it’s one of the classic Ozark bluffs made 100% from limestone so you can expect to get some interesting color from the rock.

I worked the area up and downstream, but this spot was the best as a early morning storm rolled in.  When I first arrived there were no clouds in the sky at all just a bit of river fog, but within 30 minutes the top of an old thunderhead came over the river and really added to the shot.  The heat and humidity were intense but the photographic opportunities were excellent.

This is single exposure from an IQ100 Phase One digital back and I have to say that the overall dynamic range of this back is impressive.  The ability to finally cover a shot with just one exposure, knowing that you have room to work up shadows without a bracketing series of exposures is a great feature and long overdue from Phase One.