Great Falls

To The Falls /  by Todd Henson

To the Falls

This photo of a paddler maneuvering his kayak upriver brings back great memories of a fantastic morning spent photographing the scenery and several paddlers at Great Falls on the Potomac River. I began the day photographing from some of the observation areas up top on the Virginia side. At first I focused on the river, itself, but then I began focusing on the paddlers on the water.

Later I decided to hike down the trail that leads to a lower area of rocks closer to water level. This is the trail some rafting groups take to bring their inflatable rafts to the rivers edge. From there they’ll take guests on a beautiful trip downriver. You have to be very careful in this area as it’s steep and rocky, and if it’s been raining it can make the rocks extremely slippery. And I have no interest going down there if the water level is too high. But you can see from the markings on the cliffs the water level that day was low compared to what it often is.

I found a spot on the rocks at a safe distance from the water, sat down, and started photographing. As when I was higher up at the observation areas, I focused both on the river and waterfalls, and on the paddlers in their kayaks. It’s always fun watching these folks maneuvering through the water, sometimes trying different moves, or positioning themselves for a specific feature on the river.

Then one of the paddlers maneuvered his kayak to the rocks just below me and came ashore, climbing up the rocks to sit near me. We had a nice conversation, talking about being on the river, different places where folks like to kayak, and photographing kayakers. We exchanged email addresses and I promised to send him any good shots of him I managed to create.

It was after he’d returned to the water I realized I had the opportunity to create the photo you see here. For most of the day I’d photographed paddlers using more telephoto focal lengths to zoom in on them and the action. But here I saw the potential for a wider view with the kayaker moving upriver, the larger falls in the distance, hopefully giving the viewer a sense of the anticipation of what’s to come, that slight calm before entering the rapids. I decided to title the photograph, To the Falls.

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Tranquility and Turbulence /  by Todd Henson

Tranquility and Turbulence, a Great Blue Heron watches the water rushing by below

Great Blue Herons are amazing creatures I’ve photographed many times, and hope to many times more. They can be showy and raucous, especially when around other herons competing for territory or mates. But they can also be such patient, quiet, and unmoving creatures.

Today’s photograph is of a Great Blue Heron standing on the rocks over the Potomac River at Great Falls, large quantities of water rushing by below. I’m always amazed by the contrast between the turbulence of the water and the seeming tranquility of the heron as it somehow gazes below the surface of the river searching out its next meal.

I love photographing at Great Falls. The sounds of the water act like white noise, almost drowning out other sounds, helping me focus on what I’m viewing. And the amazing speed and motion of the water keeps my attention, hypnotizing with its patterns and rhythms. I sometimes get lost in the scene.

The river can be very violent, depending on the water level. And yet, Great Blue Herons are still able to find places to fish, even in such fast moving water. They stand, perfectly still, surveying the water below. As seen in the photo, it can often be very muddy, and yet they see the fish below its surface. And as still as they often stand, it’s a real wonder to watch them when they finally lash out towards the water, beak opening to grasp a fish, forked tongue hooking the fish and pulling it in.

Have I mentioned how much I love Great Blue Herons? 😁

First Attempts at Photographing Action Sequence Panoramas /  by Todd Henson

A 4 scene action sequence panorama. This is the equivalent of an 11 megapixel image.

After watching and photographing world class kayakers paddling Great Falls on the Potomac River I wondered if I could assemble any of the images I’d created into a single action sequence image, showing the athlete at various positions all in the same photograph. I hadn’t exactly shot with this end goal in mind, so I wasn’t sure if it would work.

If I had planned for it I might have used a wider angle lens and locked the camera down on the tripod. I would have used a small enough aperture to capture the entire course in focus. Then I would have simply clicked the shutter every so often as the athlete maneuvered downriver. I could have merged these into a single image in Photoshop with minimal difficulty because each image would be of the same part of the scene and the only change from image to image would be the moving subject.

But I didn’t plan ahead this time. I didn’t use a wide angle lens. And I didn’t lock my camera down on the tripod. I used a long telephoto with a large aperture and panned with the kayak. This meant I wasn’t going to create the standard sort of action sequence, but instead an action sequence panorama, where the camera moves between images.

The images below were used to create the stitched action sequence panorama above:

George Lepp wrote a great article about this in 2011 at Outdoor Photographer magazine. Unfortunately the article is no longer freely available online, but in it he shows how to create panoramas with the subject moving parallel to him such that the depth of field remains consistent so he can use large apertures and still easily merge the photos in Photoshop.

A 5 scene action sequence panorama. This is the equivalent of a 19 megapixel image.

Unfortunately, in my case the subject was moving towards me. This caused problems with depth of field when stitching the photos together. The shallow depth of field shifted towards me as I followed the kayaker. I think there are likely ways to make this work in Photoshop.

An 8 scene action sequence panorama. This is the equivalent of a 37 megapixel image.

Another issue I ran into due to my lack of planning was not knowing if I had enough of the course captured in the images to create a larger multi-frame panorama of the scene. And as it turned out, in at least one of these sequences I hadn’t captured enough. So I tried using Photoshop’s Content Aware features to manufacture the missing pieces. It did a reasonable job in some cases and a not-so-reasonable job in others. But I present them all here for you to see. It gives an idea of some of the capabilities and limitations of that tool. I do believe a more skilled user could make better use of these features, so I keep practicing and learning. I encourage you to do the same.

One feature, or side effect, of creating stitched panorama images, wether they be standard stitched panos or these action sequence panos, is a potential increase in the size of the image. Stitching many photos together can increase the total number of pixels in the image, even when overlapping images to assist the software during the stitching process. These were all shot with an 11 megapixel camera, and you can see in the descriptions the end results varied from 11 to 37 megapixels. More megapixels can be good if you want to create a large print, or it can be bad if you’re limited in hard drive space and computer processing power. But it’s important to realize doing this can result in some very large image files.

A 10 scene action sequence panorama. I didn’t capture enough of the scene to correctly create the final image.

Because I was missing parts of the scene I attempted to use Photoshop to “create” the missing parts. This shows both good and bad examples of Photoshop’s Content Aware Fill feature. This is equivalent to a 26 megapixel image.

Have you ever attempted action sequence panoramas? If not, give them a try, and let me know about your experiences.

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