Waterfall Wednesday

Close your eyes and listen, then capture what you envisioned

Water cascading over rocks at Latourell Falls in Oregon’s Columbia River Gorge

“Waterfall Wednesday” is a popular hashtag on many social media platforms, so I’m going to make this my submission today here on Substack. Oregon is the home to many wonderful waterfalls, and many of them are easily accessible. This shot comes from Latourell Falls, in the Columbia River Gorge. A short, paved path gets you to the bottom, where you can sit and enjoy the sounds of the water rushing down over a basalt column cliff shelf above.

Whenever I’m in a place like this, I try to stop for a moment and think about how I could approach the scene differently. The first instinct of course is to try to photograph the entire thing. While I indeed did that, for this one I put down the wide-angle lens and went with a long focal length, 200mm to be exact. I wanted a tight composition of the primary falls (at right), but also the water cascading down the rock at the left. But I also did some clever tricks in post-processing to produce the final image…

The Secret Behind This Photo

For this shot, I was using a Nikon Z7 II camera and the very versatile 24-200mm f/4-6.3 zoom Nikkor Z lens. I was set up on a sturdy tripod (Gitzo 2-series if you care) with a Really Right Stuff ball head. That’s a pretty typical setup for landscape photography. So what was different? I combined a couple of techniques both during the shot and afterwards in post.

1. I used a long exposure to blur the water. In this case, 1/25s at f/11 did the trick.

2. I captured several shots of the scene, all framed identically. The difference between each shot was the way the water flowed over the rock on the left.

3. I opened several shots as layers in Adobe Photoshop, and used masking to “paint in” water flowing across the rock from different photos, which resulted in the final composite image.

4. I then used Silver Efex Pro (Nik Collection by DxO) to convert the color image to black and white before making my final tweaks (sharpening etc).

Oregon Explorer Photo Safari: April 13-18

I’m leading a photo safari in Oregon April 13-18, 2025 with my podcast co-host, Rick Walker. We’ll be there to put you in position to succeed, help you with camera settings, and help you discover creative techniques in landscape photography. In addition to photographing the waterfalls of the Columbia River Gorge, we’ll spend a few days in Newport, Oregon, photographing the beautiful scenery along the coast before returning to Portland. Space is limited, so check it out here!