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Darkelf Photography
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This lovely waterfall is another one that can be found in the Great Otway National Park in Victoria, Australia. They are found at the bottom of rather steep path but the view and the peaceful nature of the surroundings are well worth the effort to descend (and to climb back up later).
Despite the recent rain, the flow in the falls was only moderate and that reinforced my earlier vision to look for interesting foreground elements to use in my composition. After looking around I picked out this boulder with its wonderful moss and foliage attracting the eye and attention. I got right down and very close to the boulder to emphasise it in the composition. This meant that I had to use focus stacking to get good sharpness throughout the entire scene.
It was a cool overcast day, which usually creates the perfect kind of conditions for rainforest and waterfall photography. However, in the valleys, ravines and gorges that usually makes getting detail out of the shadows that much harder. Not much light is sipping through and using a polariser to remove glare and reflections from wet leaves and rocks also further deepens the shadow areas of the scene. I have to be very careful in how I use the polarising filter and what exposure settings I apply to ensure that dark parts of the image do not become just big black blobs.
These days I am much more free and open to using exposure blending to get the balance of light right in each scene. It has taken me a long time to develop my skills enough to be able to use blending in processing workflow. Also, for some reason I found it really counter intuitive to my approach to photography in the early days. I was very much "straight out of camera" type of a person, even when I started to shoot in the RAW format. Now I think of it as the extension to the artistic process that beings with taking a photograph in the camera and then further applying my vision through post processing.
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