Oakley Creek

Urban Waterfall

-- Brian

This waterfall can be found beside a busy highway in Waterview. Just a few minutes walk from the road, you'll be greeted by the calming sound of water and birds. We arrived on location just after sunrise, but with cloudy skies, the lighting is looking rather dull. Not until we started shooting that we finally got some colours in the sky. All of these images were taken with the following gears:

• Canon R6
• Tamron SP 24-70mm
• CPL
• Tripod
• Remote shutter trigger

To have the photos sharp from front to back, I used focus stacking method. Each image used in stacking is an HDR from three exposures (-1 stop, properly exposed, and +1 stop). So actually, a 6-image focus-stack is actually 18 images all together.

For my first image, I have to cross the stream and go to the other side. I positioned my camera low to get a flower in the lower left of the foreground.

For this image, I walked a little bit closer to the falls. I used the log as a leading line to the curves of the flowing bubbles before finally reaching the falls.

Now I went even closer to the right hand side of the falls. I like the texture on the rock wall so I made sure to include it in this image. The flowing bubbles help lead the image to the base of the falls. By now, the trees are getting lit by the rising sun, which gave a more vibrant colour.

And then finally, I went up the steep path beside the falls to get this image. The only non-stacked image in the set, I like to keep the foreground blurry to give the effect of peeking out of the grass.