Trillium Falls

Trillium Falls

Waterfalls. I love finding them and photographing them, so here's a new one, for me; Trillium Falls. Named after a flower that blooms in abundance in the surrounding area. Located in the Redwood National and State Parks, just north of a tiny town called Orick, the falls are easily accessed by a short hike or about a mile or so. If you've never been in a redwood forest it's really a very different kind of place. It's very lush, humid, and green with all kinds of ferns and plants on the ground and towering redwood trees. Sound doesn't escape the forest it echoes inside it. For an outdoor place there's a definite feeling of being indoors.

The falls aren't the most exciting waterfalls there are, it's maybe ten feet high, but there are lots of little cascades that make for interesting mini-falls shots. The above shot is taken from a foot bridge and as you can see it's very green. The shot is also an HDR shot.

"Upper" Trillium Falls

You can quite easily get down to the falls and this shot show cases "upper" Trillium Falls. Had I looked more intently at the map to get me there, and put together the time I would be getting there I would have noticed that the sun would be setting nearly directly behind the falls, which is why there are those sun rays peeking through at the top of the photo. My poloarizer was a good thing to have in the bag for this shot. It cut glare down off the rocks and let some of the rocks under the water in the top shot show through. Lighting and white balance was a pain in camera. Having recently gotten out of the habit of leaving the camera in Auto White Balance (letting in decide) I'd been using the Daylight setting for most of my day shooting. This setting (and all the other settings) were giving me a slightly bluish tint to my photos, which thankfully I can fine tune in Aperture, but it's another couple minutes to figure out the white balance, then get to the editing and processing of the photo. At least with Aperture's Lift & Stamp feature I can figure it out with one photo then take that setting and stamp it on all my other photos.

Both photos went through the same process, except for the bottom one not being an HDR. Both got the +Topaz Labs works of plugins; InFocus for capture sharpening, DeNoise for the water and the darker crevices of the falls, Clarity to bring out the different streams within the falls and to make the plant life look less like a blog of green and more into varying shades of green, and some output sharpening/creative sharpening with Detail.