Toquerville, Utah
September 22, 2017
18 mm: ISO 200: f/16: 1/15 sec.
Last September, I joined up with a group of other writers from Improve Photography for a Southern Utah photography trip. Luckily, it was only a couple hours away from me so I could meet up on the one night I was able to get away. That night we all met at the entrance to Toquerville Falls and spent the night shooting there before heading into Zion to do astrophotography.
This is my favorite shot from Toquerville Falls. The conditions were not great for photography as there was not a single cloud in the sky and the sun hitting the hills was so much brighter than the waterfall that was not getting hit by any sunlight.
I took three exposures to compensate and blended them in Lightroom’s HDR blend tool. One frame was exposed for the shadows around the waterfall. One frame was exposed for the land above the waterfall that was not in shadow, and the final frame was exposed for the top of the hills and sky that were getting hit by light.
It was really tough to capture the beauty of the light hitting the hills because I had to really underexpose to the point where everything but the top of the image was basically black. The problem there was blending them together to actually replicate what the scene looked like to the naked eye without having really hard transitions that looked weird. I feel like this image does a good job of capturing the natural transitions between each portion.
Gear Used:
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2 thoughts on “Toquerville Falls at Sunset”