This waterfall is in an unincorporated community in west central Arkansas called Natural Dam and is created by a dam that traverses the width of Mountain Fork Creek. The dam is so perfectly formed that it appears to be man-made, but, as the name implies, it is completely natural.
Most of the waterfalls around the state are highly dependent on rainfall, and this waterfall is no different. When I visited this cascade, this part of the state had not gotten much rain, so when I got to the dam, the falls were not flowing as strongly as I had seen in other photographs. But, I didn’t let that deter me.
It was a nice spring evening when I visited, which encouraged other people to come out and enjoy a swim in the creek and play in the falls. There were several instances where I either had to wait for them to move out of my shot or try to find shooting angles that let me hide the swimmers. Since patience has never been one of my virtues, I quickly became annoyed. But, I persevered and came away with a number of nice photographs of the dam and waterfalls.
The image above is one of my favorite shots from my visit. What I like about the image is the contrast between the cool blue tones in the water and the warmer yellow of the sunlight on the trees in the background. However, the waterfall was in deep shade while the trees in the background were still being brightly lit by the setting sun. This caused a great deal of contrast.
There are three options for handling high contrast situations. First, avoid such situations when possible. However, that is not always a practical option. Second, use the high dynamic range technique. Again, this wasn’t viable because the flow of the water would not allow the images to be properly aligned later in Photoshop.
The third option, and the option I chose to use, is to expose for the highlights. This will cause the shadows to go dark, but shadow details can usually be recovered in Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw. However, if the highlights are overexposed, they are virtually impossible to recover, and the photograph will often be ruined.
In Lightroom, I brought up the shadows to increase the detail in the waterfall. The background trees were still a little brighter than I wanted, so I reduced the highlights and applied a graduated filter to the upper half of the photograph. I then slightly tweaked the vibrance and saturation settings.
It’s been several years since I shot this image, and I would like to go back. But, this time I would like to make the trip in the fall when the leaves have changed color. I would also visit in the morning when there is less contrast. What a completely different picture that would make.