How the Burney Falls Panorama Was Made
Waterfalls are a challenge to shoot. It's tough to nail the exposure for the water and keep the shadows in the surrounding foliage from blocking up completely. Shooting in early morning/late afternoon or in overcast conditions helps avoid harsh direct sunlight on the subject, but even in those conditions it's often helpful to further control the contrast using HDR photography techniques. The pano image above of Burney Falls at McArthur-Burney State Park in Northern California was shot using a combination of HDR, pano and compositing techniques to overcome challenging exposure conditions. The Japanese proverb "there are many paths leading to the top of Mount Fuji" is a much more poetic expression of "there is more than one way to skin a cat". Here's how I made the image:
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Pick the place and plan the time to match ideal light conditions. Typically, you will not want to shoot waterfalls in direct sunlight. This shot was not taken on my first visit to Burney Falls. A couple times before, either the early morning or mid-day light was just too harsh. This time, I planned to stop by on my way to my mom and dad's place so that I'd arrive late afternoon when I thought the lighting would be more cooperative. The side of the ravine blocked the direct sunlight nicely and even better yet, a nice cloud cover further diffused the light.
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Use a polarizing filter. Larger waterfalls generate profuse mist that complicates photography. I use a polarizer not to reduce glare on the surface of the water, but rather to knock down the glare on the surrounding foliage from all the mist.
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Plan the composition. Go ahead and take the obligatory post-card shot; it will help you remember the overall environment and may be useful as a reference. But take the time try to create something unique; an image that speaks beauty to you in a way that others may not have seen. This is quite a challenge. There are so many good photographers scouring the planet trying to create original compositions that just about all popular scenic venues have been shot every which way from Sunday. Nevertheless, push yourself to find a way to highlight some aspect of your subject that specifically impresses you. The incredible veil of water oozing/dripping/gushing out from every possible crack and crevasse along the entire 129 foot-wide rock expanse is what captured my imagination. I wanted to convey that impression with an image I could enlarge nicely. I decided a wide panorama would be a great way to capture the expanse and still maintain focus on fall's veil.
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Bracket exposure. It's easy to bracket exposures with current cameras and memory card capacity is so large that I automatically do so with most landscape images I shoot nowadays. That way if I decide to post-process using HDR I have the images "in the can." Waterfalls usually look best when shot at 1/30 second or slower, so check to be sure the shutter speed on the fast end of the bracket is slow enough to show water motion blur. The Pentax 645d I used on this shot has a fairly slow frame rate, so I just took three images per bracket (0, +2 stops, -2 stops). With a really fast camera, such as my Nikon D4 or Olympus OM-D, 5 or even 7 frames per bracket is usually attainable. A steady tripod and head are a must. All settings (ISO, Focus, White Balance, Exposure) on manual.
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Test stitch. When doing an HDR pano, I find it works best to do the HDR processing first and then stitch the pano together. However, I like to run a test stitch first of just the "0" exposure to check the overall composition before I go through the somewhat time-consuming task of HDR processing each bracketed panel of the pano. At this point I can make a choice:
a) I can accept the pano in its entirety and proceed with HDR processing and then stitching.
b) I can decide to only process a sub-set of the panels; i.e., if I originally shot 7 panels, I may decide I'm only going to use 5 and discard the other 2 panels.
c) I can trash the whole thing and move on to something more productive. I usually abandon the test stitch and just use it for decision-making, but I've found it to be a real time saver in the event I opt for choice "b" or "c" above.
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HDR process. I use Photomatix Pro 4.x for all my HDR processing. I often extract HDR processed parts, such as the water or a cloudy sky, and composite that on top of an optimized single exposure. This works best when wanting a natural look with the sharpest detail I can get in the foliage, but still desire the HDR contrast/luminosity in water or sky. I copy and paste the HDR image into a layer on the single exposure image, and then selectively mask out what I want to show through.
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Stitch/Crop. Finally I perform the pano stitching using Photoshop CS6 Photomerge selecting "cylindrical" layout and "blend images together". If I like the result I flatten the image and make a final crop.