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The Yellowstone River drops over two waterfalls in a few hundred yards. This is the smaller Upper Falls (109ft); downstream are the Lower Falls, which are a crazy 308ft high (twice the height of Niagara, though very much narrower), at the head of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. The photo was taken from the trail to the top of the Lower Falls, which is a very steep third of a mile — the drop from the canyon rim is about 600ft — but well worth it for the spectacular views.
This was taken in early June, which is late spring in Yellowstone, so the rivers are swollen with melted snow from the mountains. The flow in spring is ten or twelve times what you'd see later in the year.
All comments and criticism welcome. It's deliberately dark but it does look excessively so on some monitors. Helen is hereby challenged to come up with an effective diagonal version. 
Dave.
Monday, 22nd June, 2009.
187mm, f/5.6, 1/800s, ISO-100.
| Camera: | Canon EOS 400D |
| Lens: | Canon 70-200mm f/4 L IS |
| Recording media: | RAW (digital) |
| Title: | Yellowstone (II) |
| Username: | 
DRicherby |
| Uploaded: | 5 Aug 2009 - 1:40 PM |
| Tags: | Black & white, Landscape / travel |
| VS Mode Rating |
Unrated These stats show the percentage of wins and the rating score that your photo has achieved. You can go to the VS Mode by clicking on this icon. Signup to e2Signup to e2 to see which photo this has won or lost against in the vs mode |
| Votes: | 35 |
| Modifications Welcome (Upload a Modification) |
 | Variant - Before and After |
Comments
A very dramatic and bold composition.
As you say, a tad dark, but I don't think that's really a problem with the bold graphic essentials.
Nicely done, David.
Cheers
Bill
Kath, the glib answer is that I just fiddled with the controls until I got the look I wanted! But that doesn't help much. 
First off, the photograph itself. It was taken mid-afternoon, looking due north. The geotag shows you roughly where I was standing, somewhere near the lower falls — the upper falls are a few hundred yards upstream, at the point where the river curves from running approximately to the west to running south. (It's easier to see on the satellite view.) The canyon is dark rock, the trees are darkish pines; the sun was shining straight at the falls and the massive cloud of spray. The falls were obviously going to dominate the photograph, so it was essential that they not be blown out so the only option, short of attempting something with HDR, was to expose for the falls and hope the shadows weren't too dark. (This is a reasonable hope — dark shadows are `moody', while blown highlights on this would have been a hideous block of solid white.)
As you can see from the original version, which I've now uploaded, the result was a pretty dark photograph. The colours are drab so black and white was a no-brainer. As you can see, I rotated it a little, which resulted in a slight crop. I don't recall exactly what I did but, once the b/w conversion was done, the major part of the `feel' came from using the curves tool, mainly to make the falls more intense but also to lose even more detail from the shadows, while keeping enough there to hint at what's going on.
That got most of what I wanted, but there were still a few things to do. You'll notice that I've cloned out the out-of-focus branches from the lower right corner. I also did some minor dodging and burning. Most significant of that was to brighten the white water in the river, to make it stand out more. A few bright fallen treetrunks got darkened, too — especially the ones in the upper right corner; I fancy I should have maybe toned down some of those bright bare branches in the lower left, too.
I hope that was in some way helpful.
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