369 - Wahkeena Loop
*Note: This adventure also features an in-field vlog.
The most popular waterfall in all of Oregon is just one component of this five mile hike that features five waterfalls. This is the Wahkeena Trail.
Was that a dramatic enough of an intro for ya?
This trail came in like a miracle. One day I was sitting around looking at all the waterfalls in the area, wondering which one to pick for a photoshoot. We had the famous Multnomah Falls, the beautiful Fairy Falls, Multnomah Falls, and a handful of other relatively unknown falls to choose from.
I was browsing AllTrails reviews and someone suggested a 5 mile loop that hits all of them. I looked into it, saw the route, and was instantly sold.
I'm starting to think that 5 miles is the perfect distance for a photography shoot. Just enough to create a solid story, and just enough to get a variety of different b-roll sequences.
We hit the trail at 6:30AM, right when sunrise was happening. Our plan was to hit Multnomah Falls right away, so that we could get a shot without a million people running around. Luckily, we showed up and it was completely deserted. I managed to snag this shot right away, running 0.2 miles up 200 feet in less than 60 seconds to be in frame before my timer started. I barely made it:
“Waterfall Prince”
Sony a7rIII + Zeiss 24-70mm f/4
ISO 100 ~ 22mm ~ f/14 ~ 0.8s
(Want a Print? Get one here.)
We continued along the trail in the opposite direction you would expect, heading to Wahkeena Falls instead of scaling Multnomah. It turned out to be a shit waterfall, so I just skipped getting a shot of it. You can check out the b-roll of me walking by it in the vlog if you really wanna see it.
Eventually we landed on Fairy Falls, which also turned out to be a bit of a bummer. It was WAY smaller than I was expecting, and the sun was literally right above the waterfall's crux. I played around with some compositions for awhile, and could not for the life of me figure out a solid shot. There was a walking plank right in front of it, which ruined the foreground.
And it was at this point that I had a realization... Why am I so avid about avoiding man-made structures in my landscape photography? What if there was a way I could make the plank in this shot beautiful….
Then it hit me like a plank. I found a corner with clovers growing out of it, and bracketed the shot. Check this honey out:
Let me say that shot was an absolute BITCH to edit. The sky was blown to shit way worse than I was expecting, to the point where the trees around them had absolutely no detail compared to the vibrant green plants right below them- even in the bracketed shot. In order to compensate for this, I blended a light blue halo effect around them, to simulate fog. This helped give a reason for the loss of detail above.
And it came out dank! I usually do yellow glows at the top of waterfalls, so this was an interesting edit choice I will definitely consider for waterfalls in the future.
OK! Let's move along. We get about halfway down the trail, and we enter one of the coolest forests I've ever been to in my life. It's these HUGE skinny trees, many of which are burnt from a former forest fire. So there's not many branches- just tall trunks. Almost like palm trees. And the light just happened to be going through them magically.
I got this shot right here, with myself in the corner for scale.
Now... That was an interesting shot. Initially I planned on only getting a shot of the trees silhouetted with a sun star, but upon finding THIS composition, my former idea didn't look that great. HOWEVER... That idea for a minimalist silhouette shot helped me figure out a composition later in this vlog. I'll get to that in a bit...
FIRST we need to cover this random shot I almost didn't include in the lineup:
“Lime Light”
Sony a7rIII + Zeiss 24-70mm f/4
ISO 800 ~ 68mm ~ f/11 ~ 1/160s
(Want a Print? Get one here.)
Super basic, but I loved it. Don't feel like I need to explain much about it- I loved the dark burnt trees contrasted with the green.
We continued down the trail in search of the last two waterfalls, with which we had no idea what to expect. The first one, Ecola Falls, was pretty much impossible to shoot. There's only one angle on the trails that lets you see it, and you're basically on the edge of a cliff looking down on it through trees. So we kept going.
Finally we stumbled upon Weisendanger Falls, which I assumed would lead us to a similar fate because it was basically the same situation as Ecola Falls.
Except it wasn't.
We kept going down the trail and it turned out you can walk right up to it after dropping quite a bit of elevation. At this point, I was SUPER psyched because I wasn't sure if the Fairy Falls shot turned out, and I really wanted at least one entire waterfall shot from this shoot.
Turns out, I was feeling abstract for this waterfall. I was pretty burnt out from all the waterfalls in the past couple days, so I went real deep. Check this out:
Now cut back to when I said the shot from EARLIER set me up for that. I envisioned it being a surreal waterfall silhouette, and that idea CAME from the tree shot that didn't turn out. Pretty neat, eh? Crazy how one idea can not turn out, but be the platform for ANOTHER idea later on.
Anyway, that shot really excited me, because it feels like something TRUELY original to me... A whole new way of looking at nature I've never done before.
Well... That's all I got for ya. FUCK that was a lot of shots to edit. So much shooting today, I'm in a photography coma.
BYE.
I’m on a mission to explore as much as humanely possible.
Want to see my progress? Check out the Adventure Map.
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