_MG_3486_Mirador El Salto
Little waterfall in the Cuban rainforest.
Little waterfall in the Cuban rainforest.
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Jan, 2014Views
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Behind The Lens
Location
This photo was taken on a beautiful November morning in the countyside of Cuba. As we were walking from the parking lot to the trail head we saw the sign that we thought was the name of the park or the falls. Neither my wife nor I speak Spanish and our tour guide simply told us we were going to see a beautiful waterfall. The sign says: Mirador El Salto. After we got home, back to Vancouver, I looked it up on Google and found lots of pictures of falls, but not mine. I searched for a translation and found "Mirador" is Viewpoint, and El Salto is "the jump or fall". Viewpoint of the falls. Never did find out if there was an official name!Time
The phot was taken at 9:45am in the morning under a sunny sky with scattered clouds.Lighting
The lighting was strictly natural and not quite overhead.Equipment
I used a Canon 70D with a 18-135mm lens at approx 35mm. I had a polarizer, tripod and infra red remote.Inspiration
I love nature and landscapes and this little waterfall was something I had to experiment with to the chagrin of my wife and tour guide. But, I took the time to get the right composition.Editing
I shoot everything raw. So, post processing is a must. In most cases I will try to enhance the shot with contrast, vibrance and a little saturation. I am not a traditionalist where the photo has to be a replica of what is there. I want it to talk to others and make them say wow! That involves a little hank panky with light HDR methods or maybe a little gamma tweaking etc. I like to have fun with it and love post.In my camera bag
It depends on where I'm going. For the most part, I will carry 5 or 6 sd cards, my walkabout superzoom (18-250 mm Sigma), 10-20 mm Sigma, polarizer, Neutral density 8, tripod, remote, flash (canon 430ex) 3 canon batteries, extra AA, lens and sensor cleaner and my Olympus TG-3 tough for underwater and sandy beaches. I also carry my 7" android tablet, 1Tb seagate portable HDD and a RAVpower wifi enabled card reader to transfer my photos to the portable HDD. Found it on Amazon for $45.00 and it works great. I do have a 150-600mm contempory Sigma lens that I will bring along for wildlife if I know there will be some to photograph.Feedback
Don't let other peoples' impatience spoil your shots. I believe in bracketing any image that I deem worth photographing. In the case of this waterfall, I used a tripod to get a slow shutter speed, a polarizer and a very small aperture. (I didn't have an ND filter at the time). I set my camera to bracket 5 shots on either side of "perfect exposure" and probably ended up with at least 50 shots at different exposures (shutter speed only) and angles. During post, I looked over all the shots, found the set that I wanted to use, applied some basic editing to each and then combined them in photoshops' HDR utility.
