02/06/25 Featured Arkansas Photography–Fall Scene from Peter Cave Bluff

                                                                                                Focus Braacket 16 images from Peter Cave Bluff

Fall color in Arkansas has been on the decline over the last 5 years.  There have been many reasons listed, but whatever the cause, the colors in the state just are not as beautiful as they used to be 10 years ago.  Peter Cave Bluff, is on the Buffalo National River, near the middle of the river.  I love to photograph there since you have a grand vista of the countryside and can still feature the Buffalo River.  There is a large single cedar tree that grows out of the bluff and I always try to make it a part of the photograph.

This image was taken with a Hasselblad X2D, and 21mm XCD lens.  Even with the extra wide lens, I still needed to setup for a focus bracketing as I wanted to capture the rock of the bluff which was about 2 feet away from me.  No medium format lens/camera combination I know can do this in a single frame even with apertures in the F16 range.  Here also a tech camera would be a waste as if you added tilt to the shot to pull in the rocks in the foreground, you would quickly lose the top of the image to bluff since you have tilted the plane of focus.  For many years I worked with a tech camera mainly for tilt and shift, but now with modern software and focus bracketing, I just don’t see the need for the tech camera system.

This particular shot was taken with 16 shots, two sets of 8 exposures at F 6.3.  I had no wind that evening so I knew that movement would not interfere with the process. I had to take one set of shots at a higher exposure to hold the sky from blowing out in the areas where the sun was shinning through.  The other set of 8 I used a slower exposure to help pull up the foreground.  All the images were converted from raw files in Phocus.  Then ran two sets of 8 image through Helicon Focus to create the focus bracketed sets, and then combined the two sets into one image.

Paul Caldwell, written on 02/06/25