Shooting the Shooter Part Seven - Alsea Falls

On the MLK holiday weekend Ann and I decided to plan a couple of photo trips to take advantage of the long weekend (a 4-day weekend since Ann works 4 long work days and gets Fridays off).  The theme of the weekend, if there was one, was wildlife photography and finding places we could do that at.Friday was pretty much a bust.  We went to a couple of parks in the Eugene-Springfield area that wound up being scouting trips - mostly to determine that they really aren’t very good sites to photograph.  We didn’t wind up with any useable images, which was disappointing, but that’s how it goes sometimes.  Scouting trips can tell you a place is bad, just as much as tell you how great it is.  At least now we know not to bother with those locations.

We decided that we didn’t want the next day to be a bust as well, so we planned our second trip to go up to the William L. Finley National Wildlife Refuge, just north of Monroe, Oregon, about an hour away.  We’d been there before and were confident that there would be something to see and photograph there.  As always we had a backup plan, so our plan for the day included a trip to Alsea Falls, not too far away from Finley NWR, on the return trip.

The trip to Finley wasn’t too bad.  We’d planned to get there around 8 and we did.  Unfortunately, it was probably a bit later than ideal  That was apparent before we even got there  given that from miles away we could see giant flocks of geese flying around and then away from the NRW.  When we got there we saw a couple other photographers and there were still some trumpeter swans, geese and ducks around.  The sun was still very low and Ann got some decent shots with beautiful light.  The rest of the NRW is closed in the winter so we decided that we would come back even earlier the next day (before dawn - we arrived at 6:40) to get there before the masses of wildlife departed the pond.  

With the wildlife gone we took off to Alsea Falls.  At first it looked like our best laid plans would be thwarted yet again.  The park is officially closed in the winter - which means that the gates are locked.  Still, there is parking along the main road and we weren’t the only ones there to hike.  So we parked and walked on in.  But then when we got to the top of the falls, the main trail down to Alsea Falls was closed for repairs - with people actively working on it.  Not to be deterred, we went across a foot bridge and followed a trail to another set of falls.  We never got there - this time for a good reason.  

About a quarter mile down the trail following the South Fork Alsea River, we came across a steep side trail that led down to the river.  Looking through the trees I saw what I thought were some interesting looking rocks and that looked as if you could get out into the river (more like a big creek) to get unobstructed views.  So we headed down instead of onward to Peak Creek Falls.

Sure enough, I was right and Ann and I started shooting away.  I think we were there for about an hour, and then Ann said, “Let me take one more shot, OK?”

Alsea River - Ann Shooting

I said sure and grabbed my camera to make another shot or two for myself.  Ann stayed in one place for quite a while, really focused on what she had in her viewfinder.  I eventually waked over and looked at her LCD screen.  The image was stunning!  So I told her to keep at it, I had to get a shot of her taking this shot because I knew it would be a good one and it’d make the perfect image for the post.  She of course said something disparaging about how it will probably turn out, but she didn’t stop me from making my shot.

She then asked for a bit of advice to make sure she got what she could, but she had covered all the bases I’d thought of.  All that was left was to go home and see if the image was as good as we thought.

Right out of the camera the image was great.  Still, the camera doesn’t see what we see, so we discussed generally what she was looking for in the image, what effects she wanted to get where in the image, and where the different photos/exposures were deficient and needed work.

Over the next few days she started with one frame and worked at it a bit (trying to lighten the sunlit water), but was less than satisfied about the sunny part of the water. So the next day she started working on another frame that had the sunlit water too harsh, thinking she’d come at it from the other direction - darken that part of the water to make it look right.  And of course, she had to work on everything else again too.  If you ask me, her effort was worth it.

Here’s her final product:

Like I said, great image!  

As Ann and I talked about the image when she was done with it, she scrolled over her brush tool and it showed all the different points where she made minor tweaks.  Ann’s getting better and better with her “darkroom” work and is developing a subtlety that a lot of photographers don’t have.  

Most images straight out of the camera don’t come close to what the eye saw.  Not surprising because the eye and a sensor (or film) are very different things.  So if you want to recreate what you saw and, more importantly, what you felt when you saw something, you have to work with the image.  I’m not talking about photoshopping in things that weren’t there, I’m talking about things such as lightening a bit, darkening a bit, increasing contrast or adding some color saturation here or there, sharpening the image a bit and things like that.  Sometimes as you work one thing, the relationship with something else changes how that appears so you have to tweak that thing to make everything look normal again.  Sometimes you make a subtle tweak, and then another one over that one, then one again over the other two.   

It’s a process that can quickly add up.  You glance over at your history (each tweak is non-destructive to the image and gets recorded as an “instruction” so you can go backwards if you want to) which suddenly reveals that you’ve been working an image a lot.  Yet the image looks “normal.”  Well that was the case with this image.  So I asked Ann to make a screen shot of just the points indicating each of her brush strokes, with each point covering an area that was brushed and then worked on, so folks can understand the type of skill, mental effort and decision-making it takes to make a nice image like this one.

So even with an image that was 95% close to being just right from the get go, it can take a lot of work to get that final 5%.  Way to go Ann!