mattymeis
Mirror
Marc Adamus is my favorite artist. He is a true explorer and an absolutely incredible photographer. This is his vision from Elowah, I was also inspired by the great shots from @maxfosterphotography and @scottsmorra. At the very least, this is an extremely fun shot to try your hand at. I had a blast at this waterfall. It is also a pretty technical shot to pull off and I'll explain why. When you're shooting forests and waterfalls, you almost always want to shoot with a polarizer. A polarizer will remove reflective light and saturate the natural colors in a scene. This creates an awesome effect and really enhances the photo. Well obviously in this photo there is a reflection of Elowah Falls in the small pool of water. But, the rest of the photo has no polarized or reflective light. To achieve this I combined 5-6 different shots in what I'll call a 'polarizer-blend'. I removed the polarizing effect for my first shots so I could get the reflection of the falls and then I adjusted my filter for the background so there would be no reflective light. What makes this extremely difficult is that I also needed to focus stack exposures. The pool pictured at the bottom is very small and my lens was probably 2 inches or so away from it. I'd guess the pool is around 2'x2'. To ensure my entire photo was in focus, I needed to take multiple exposures at varying focal ranges. I didn't use a tripod for this. It's really hard to setup a tripod on this rock since it's kind of unbalanced. Instead, I grabbed a short stick and braced my camera on the base of the rock. I then took shots at varying focal ranges (polarized and non-polarized) and chose which images I wanted to blend together during post-processing. I ended up also taking some extra exposures for the background at a faster shutter speed to freeze some of the moving foliage. As you can see, there are a lot of shots that go into this final image. It requires some planning and knowing exactly what shots you need before you attempt it. I visited a few days before and tried to pull this off. After realizing I botched it, I thought about what shots I needed and came back again. My second trip was much more successful. I would say that Elowah is actually very hard to compose with a high flow. The stream current was pretty strong and it was tough to move around to different spots. All in all, it was a great first visit and I'm excited to photograph this one in fall sometime.
This is a bunch of shots from a Nikon D800e.
EXIF - I can't remember exactly, but something like this:
2 shots unpolarized for foreground at 14mm, f/18, 1/5s, ISO 100
3 shots polarized for background at 14mm, f/16, 1/5s, ISO 100
1 shot polarized for foliage at 14mm, f/16, 1/20s, ISO 800
I am on Instagram - @mattymeis
Mirror
Marc Adamus is my favorite artist. He is a true explorer and an absolutely incredible photographer. This is his vision from Elowah, I was also inspired by the great shots from @maxfosterphotography and @scottsmorra. At the very least, this is an extremely fun shot to try your hand at. I had a blast at this waterfall. It is also a pretty technical shot to pull off and I'll explain why. When you're shooting forests and waterfalls, you almost always want to shoot with a polarizer. A polarizer will remove reflective light and saturate the natural colors in a scene. This creates an awesome effect and really enhances the photo. Well obviously in this photo there is a reflection of Elowah Falls in the small pool of water. But, the rest of the photo has no polarized or reflective light. To achieve this I combined 5-6 different shots in what I'll call a 'polarizer-blend'. I removed the polarizing effect for my first shots so I could get the reflection of the falls and then I adjusted my filter for the background so there would be no reflective light. What makes this extremely difficult is that I also needed to focus stack exposures. The pool pictured at the bottom is very small and my lens was probably 2 inches or so away from it. I'd guess the pool is around 2'x2'. To ensure my entire photo was in focus, I needed to take multiple exposures at varying focal ranges. I didn't use a tripod for this. It's really hard to setup a tripod on this rock since it's kind of unbalanced. Instead, I grabbed a short stick and braced my camera on the base of the rock. I then took shots at varying focal ranges (polarized and non-polarized) and chose which images I wanted to blend together during post-processing. I ended up also taking some extra exposures for the background at a faster shutter speed to freeze some of the moving foliage. As you can see, there are a lot of shots that go into this final image. It requires some planning and knowing exactly what shots you need before you attempt it. I visited a few days before and tried to pull this off. After realizing I botched it, I thought about what shots I needed and came back again. My second trip was much more successful. I would say that Elowah is actually very hard to compose with a high flow. The stream current was pretty strong and it was tough to move around to different spots. All in all, it was a great first visit and I'm excited to photograph this one in fall sometime.
This is a bunch of shots from a Nikon D800e.
EXIF - I can't remember exactly, but something like this:
2 shots unpolarized for foreground at 14mm, f/18, 1/5s, ISO 100
3 shots polarized for background at 14mm, f/16, 1/5s, ISO 100
1 shot polarized for foliage at 14mm, f/16, 1/20s, ISO 800
I am on Instagram - @mattymeis