Valley of the Waters

I really love this walk, I love it even more early in the morning, like just after the crack of dawn, its a very popular walk and thats a great thing for sure, however sometimes you just want a bit of space and not run into someone every 10 steps, hence thats where the early morning start comes in.

I trekked down to these falls shortly after sunrise, passing Empress falls on the way and passed two people, one was a fairly elderly lady coming up the valley, which meant she had probably walked all the way round from wennie falls – which is not a stroll in the park, the second was a chap about my age (thats young btw 😉 ) who was jogging, yes, you read that right.. jogging down the walk. I did not really know what to say to him, so 'gday mate' was about it, with a bit of disbelief admiration 🙂

Anyway's, the Sylvia Falls is a very popular photographic spot too, super easy to compose and most people go for the vertical, i did too when I first visited 🙂 however this time, and its kinda a phase I am going thru, i want to capture a pano of the falls, giving a bit of texture and context to the scene, showing the falls (which are very cool on the black rocks ), the drop to the right and also the sharp incline on the left where the path is cut in.

Strangely enough panoramas are actually quite easy to compose and in my opinion much more forgiving than say the standard 6:4 format, I say this since the brain reads from left to right (in most languages anyway), thus the image taker has already the advantage that the viewer will natural flow thru image when looking at it, that said, its also very easy in panos to create that dreaded 'big empty space' so getting right up close and personal can often work much better – see the next image from this same spot for an example…

There is one key flaw in this image and I blame photoshop 🙂 I cloned out / content aware filled the hand rail on the left, but by geez it did a rubbish job and I did not notice until the very end, I really should go back and fix that…

Exif love:
7 landscape orientation shots stitched together in PS
D750 coupled with Nikkor 24-70mm f2.8 @ 28mm Aperture: f16 and Shutter Speed: 5s to 13s (note I changed the shutter speed as i took them to control teh exposure as I went around)
ISO 100
Out front – Hoya CPL.