| Joined: | Wed Apr 18th, 2012 |
| Location: | United Kingdom |
| Posts: | 4186 |
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Waterfall Swallet is something I only discovered earlier this year in Derbyshire.
It's a sinkhole in limestone with a small river dropping over the edge, down a limestone cliff, then a few yards on, disappearing into clefts in the rock, quite a magical place. It's located near the small village of Foolow. In wet times the clefts can't dispose of the water fast enough, in which case it floods, maybe as much at 12 to 15 feet deep.
I have visited several times, most recently on my way to meet with Graham and Eric at Frampton RSPB. On this occasion I wanted to try to capture star trails through the tree canopy. The challenge was to also get a half decent image of the waterfall too, in the middle of the night.
Fortunately it was a moonless night, one less complication. I tried several ways to illuminate the waterfall and rock face, with a torch and by using my SB800 flash, hand held, making multiple flashes at 1:128 power during 30 second exposures.
I used the D3 with the 16mm f/2.8 lens. I made about ten exposures of the waterfall then locked the camera down and set the intervalometer to make 30 second exposures at 45 second intervals, started the intervalometer and retired to the car for about half an hour. This was about 2am. I wanted to get moving because I wasn't sure how long it would take me to get down to Frampton marsh.
I have to say the star trail exposures are far from perfect, the sky should have been blue, not grainy grey. Also, I should have made the image upright, that would have included the bottom of the waterfall and more sky, bu these things only become apparent after the event, will try harder next time.
The image is a collage, the lower half a single exposure, the upper half, sky made from about 25 exposures which were processed in StarstaX star processing software which creates the star trails. Some cloning and erasing done in Photoshop, returning to Lightroom then using NIK filters to extract more detail and an effect which seemed to get the most from the image, despite leaving it somewhat grainy.
So, my somewhat clumsy attempt to make a waterfall and star trail combination photograph.
Looks a very nice place! And super job.
A minor point...I would have liked the star trails a bit more prevalent.
Have you tried playing with layer modes?
You might be able to get the star trails more evident by using darker, lighter, overlay to name but a few. Presumably you put the star trails under the waterfall layer? Try a third layer with the stars on top and another mode. Multiply is another good one to increase contrast. Of course you can back off the opacity and do other stuff to minimise interference with foliage.
Just a thought.
Very nice work so far.
Sorry just reread your explanation re the collage. As you haven't got stars on separate layer from THIS shoot....why can't you use a plain sky shot of trails from another occasion as the third layer?
Last edited on Sat May 19th, 2018 10:46 by Eric
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Eric