Last spring I had a great photo trip with my great friends Rick LePage and Matt Kloskowski. We donned wetsuits early, climbed over the infamous logjam and photographed Oneonta Falls in the Columbia Gorge, then scurried to pick up our buddy Brian Matiash in Portland before heading down to Cape Perpetua to photograph Thor's Well. It was a long exciting day with great friends, amazing locations, good food, cold rivers and crazy off course bushwhacking.
Somehow I never got around to editing the photos from Oneonta that day. I worked on the Thors Well images, got busy and... That's one of the joys of winter though, going through your photos from the year past and finding those gems that you missed.
To capture this image I stood right in the middle of the stream with my tripod low over these rocks. The light was changing as the cloud cover thinned and shifted creating some diffuse directional backlight that sent rays through the back of the canyon. The greatest challenge was to keep the big front element of my Nikon 14-24 dry. The combination of heavy mist coming off the falls and light intermittent rain kept me covering the lens with a cloth and cap and trying to wipe it dry in between shots.
I've been in to Oneonta Falls many times. It's one of those great locations worth returning to again and again because it never seems the same twice.
ONEONTA AND RAYS: Nikon D800, Nikon 14-24 at F11 for 1/3 sec at ISO100
As usual I preformed my RAW adjustments in Adobe's Lightroom 5 before finishing this image in onOne's Perfect Photo Suite 9. I used the following Perfect Effects filters: Dynamic Contrast, Green Color Enhancer, Fall Color Enhancer and Sunshine Warm Highlights.