09/22/16 Featured Arkansas Landscape Photography–Sunset at Calico Rock on the White River

Sunset from Calico Rock on the White River in Arkansas

Taken with a Fuji X-Pro2, ISO 400, 35mm F2.0 lens, at F9, Panorama taken in 4 vertical images, each segment 3 exposures for a total of 12.  Worked up in Adobe LR

Calico Rock, is one of the more interesting spots on the White River in Arkansas.  You can drive right to it and when you arrive, you have a sweeping view of one of the larger bends of the White River.  The bluff is about 150 feet above the river and you really cannot see much of the bluff itself.  However there is one vantage spot where you can look to the west an there is a small out cropping that adds a lot to the photograph.  Many call this “little Hawksbill Craig” after the larger feature up on the Buffalo River.  However I just like to photograph the valley.  If you look downstream, you will see the town of Calico Rock on the left hand bank of the river.

This shot was taken in a series of vertical segments, 4 total and for each segment I exposed 3 images.  I then worked each of the 3 shots into a HDR balanced image in Lightroom.  After that, I took the final 4 images and created a panorama.  It’s very important to realize that you do not want to do any work on the individual HDR segments before the panorama merge.  I prefer to use the boundary warp feature of Lightroom also as most of panoramas in taken like this will only work in a spherical format and thus your top and bottom edges will have some problems.

The Fuji X-Pro2 makes this very easy with it’s automatic bracketing shutter, where you only have to press the shutter once to fire all 3 brackets.

I have found that Fuji made some very good positive changes to the dynamic range of the X-Pro2 as can be seen in this image.  Also Adobe must have done a bit of tweaking to their X-trans conversion for the X-Pro2.

You can get to Calico Rock from Little Rock, in about 3 hours and the drive is quite beautiful.