Davies Bridge Waterfall

After photographing the waterfall at the Lake Bailey dam, I visited a second waterfall just off Davies Bridge. The Davies Bridge waterfall is located on the west end of Roosevelt Lake where Red Bluff Drive traverses Cedar Creek. Just like the waterfall at Lake Bailey dam, the Davies Bridge waterfall is highly dependent on rainfall to generate sufficient water volume for the lake to overflow and create the waterfall.

I have shot this waterfall a couple of times before but not after as much rain as we’d had. A lot of the areas where I would have set up my tripod were covered in water, so there were only a couple of spots from which I could photograph. Of course, most of those locations were on wet, slippery rocks. I finally found a location approximately ten feet from the waterfall. But, one slip would have me either sliding into the water or falling approximately 20 feet into the creek below. Neither option was particularly desirable.

The flow of the water over the lip of the waterfall was so smooth that it looked like molten glass, and that was the quality I wanted to capture. Using my 100-400mm lens, I focused on a small section of the waterfall as it flowed over the edge. To further emphasize the glass-like quality of the water, I included a small portion of the fall’s lip. Using the lens’s smallest aperture and the camera’s lowest ISO gave me the slowest possible shutter speed for the shot.

Opening the image on my computer, I adjusted the exposure, contrast, highlights, and shadows. But, I made two adjustments that were critical to creating the photograph I had in mind. First, I reduced the color temperature of the picture because I wanted the final image to have slightly cooler tones. Second, I used the dehaze slider to reduce the glare on the water flowing over the rock. This provided some additional contrast and further highlighted the water’s glassy quality.

Settings: 100mm, 0.6 sec, f/32, ISO 100