Palouse Falls Dawn

Palouse Falls in eastern Washington State is a spectacular waterfall that plummets 200 feet into a huge natural amphitheater. The afternoon before I took this photograph, I scouted locations for sunrise photographs the next morning and set up my tent in Palouse Falls State Park (back when camping was still allowed there). The next morning before sunrise I went to the several photo locations I had hoped to take photos and realized that none of them were decent compositions at dawn. So as the rising sun was nearing the horizon, I scrambled to find a better location. I found this viewpoint beyond where I had scouted before. I had enough time to set up my camera and fire off two series of manually bracketed exposures, one series for the waterfall and much darker ground, and a second for the much brighter sky. I knew from experience that the contrast between the ground and sky was too great to process well from one exposure, and that I needed to bracket widely to later choose two exposures I could process well and blend. The sky exposure was f22 at 0.6 seconds, 100 ISO. The ground exposure was f20 at 6 seconds, ISO 100. I used a 6 second exposure to blur the waterfall. I used a 14 mm Samyang lens to capture the expanse from the deep foreground canyon to the high clouds.