Elowah Falls roaring with heavy spring run off.
Elowah Falls is one of the most beautiful in the Columbia River Gorge, but it is a bit off of the beaten path so it is not one of the most visited. It is one of my favorite spots to visit during tourist season when it’s more famous cousins are swarming with visitors. I am proud to present Elowah Spring Runoff as the latest entry in the new blog series Image of the Week.
Located just to the East of the ‘waterfall alley’ section of the Gorge Elowah is visually very similar to Latourell Falls. The falls are accessed from a parking lot in John B. Yeon State Park near the town of Dodson. While officially listed at 289 feet tall this includes nearby Upper McCord Creek Falls, the visible plunge is about 220 feet. It is a very pleasant hike of a bit more than half a mile into the base of the falls.
On this spring day the biggest challenge was the spray. The snowmelt runoff had the falls running very heavy and it was very difficult to keep the lens dry. I spent a good deal of the shoot downstream and on the large boulder just to the east of the splash pool to avoid the worst of the spray. Elowah Spring Runoff was captured just above the bridge by wiping the lens between each of the five shots composited into the final HDR image. In post processing I used Adobe Photoshop CS5 to combine the five raw images into the final result.
Elowah is well worth adding to your next Columbia River Gorge intinerary!
Technical Specs:
- Raw images with Nikon D300 @ 400 ISO
- Tokina AT-X 116 PRO DX (AF 11-16mm f/2.8) @ 14mm
- 1/4, 1/6, 1/10, 1/15, 1/25 second @ ƒ/16
- Thursday, May 19, 2011 @ 18:50
- Columbia River Gorge, Oregon, USA