Upper Whitetop Laurel Falls

Posted on August 22, 2011 | 10 comments

Sunday afternoon I packed my gear and headed out to shoot for a while. The weather forecast called for a slight chance of thunderstorms but the radar was clear for miles so all seemed good. Before I made it halfway to the location I had in mind the rain was pouring down! Out of nowhere a huge rain storm had bloomed and was making its way across the area. Once I made it to the location I sat in the car for another 30 minutes waiting for the rain to stop; when it finally stopped I put on my boots and headed up the river. I have tried to shoot this set of falls on two other occasions this summer only to be rained out before I could get there so I wasn’t going to turn back this time if I could help it.

Whitetop Laurel Falls is actually made up of two drops, the smaller of the two being featured in today’s image. The Virginia Creeper Trail crosses the river less than a hundred yards above the falls. For me, the bridge crossing in the background is what makes this image; without the bridge this is just another waterfall shot and it was the major reason that I kept trying to get back to this spot.

The water was moving so fast that you almost didn’t need a filter to smooth it but I decided to shoot it with an ND4 to help bring down the highlights in the rapids. After importing, I applied a few local adjustments to the background and the rocks on the right of the frame in Lightroom. I was pretty happy with the result but decided to run it through Topaz Adjust to see what else I could do with it. Increasing exposure and saturation very slightly yielded the image above.

Camera settings: Canon 60D, Canon EF-S 18-135mm Lens, 24mm, ISO100, f/11, 1/8 second, ND4

Processing: Adobe Lightroom 3, Topaz Adjust