Posted on Jul.23, 2017, under black and white, Landscape, Michigan, Travel, Upper Peninsula

(Sony A7rii, 24-240mm f/3.5-6.3 OSS at 24mm, Exposure 25 seconds @ f/14, ISO 200)

My wife and I recently took a trip to the far northern reaches of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. It is an area of the state that I had not visited since I was very young. On the way up to the tip of the Keweenaw Peninsula, we found this really nice waterfall called Canyon Falls. My wife was driving and I was actually searching on line to see if there were any interesting points of interest along the way. I ran across a reference to Canyon Falls, just off of Highway 41 south of L’Anse, Michigan. The falls are reachable from a simple roadside park. There wasn’t any publicity about the site, if you didn’t know about it, you might as likely have just driving right on by. However, we found it and pulled off to check it out and we were not disappointed.

The river itself is a short walk down from the entrance to the roadside park. As you walk through the woods, you can hear the water, but you can’t see much. After a few minutes, however, you can see the river. I had recently purchased a couple of ND filters (3, 6, and 10 stop) from Breakthrough Photography and I wanted to give them a try. I was able to find a few locations along the river where I could set up my tripod to get some good shots. I haven’t done a lot of shooting long exposures, and I don’t typically shoot landscapes, so this was somewhat of a new experience for me. However, I was able to get a few shots without people in them, and I managed to get the look I was going for with the long exposure. One of the great things about the ND filters from Breakthrough Photography is that they impart no color cast on the image. I’ve used other ND filters that required work to remove the color cast. With these filters, no adjustment was necessary. Even though I did eventually go with black and white it was nice to work with a filter that worked so well without a color cast.

The finished image above was created entirely using Adobe Lightroom. The raw file was quite bright and I had to bring down the exposure to bring back some detail in the river. I debated about going with color, since the river is this really nice root beer color. There are several falls in the Upper Peninsula that have this color, mostly it comes from decaying cypress trees. You can see the color version of the image below:

 

By way of comparison, here is where the image started:

 

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Copyright © 2017 James W. Howe – All rights reserved

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