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Edit: When I went to geotag this, I learned that I never in fact reached Lower Brandy Creek Falls. Leon Turnball has it mapped .2 miles down the trail from the parking area which I never left. So I renamed this “Very” because it’s not an official waterfall. but it’s beautiful none the less.

My wife and kids have been out of town since Tuesday, so I’ve been bachin’ it all by myself. After work yesterday I stayed in Redding and hoped to meet up with a friend and take him to shoot a waterfall. He had to work late, so I headed up to Lower Brandy Creek Falls near Wiskeytown Lake alone. I arrived at the parking area with plans to shoot both the upper and lower falls. The lower falls are located right at the parking area. Having never been here, I didn’t really know what to expect. I was pleasantly surprised that the lower falls is more a section of the creek with five 6-8 foot cascades. I found so much to shoot here that I didn’t have the time or need to head up the the bigger upper falls. That’s for another expedition.

In this section of the creek, water is flowing through various slots carved through huge granite boulders and bedrock that make up the narrow canyon here. Most of these falls would probably be a blast to slide down and swim in. The rock is all smooth and the water a very comfortable temperature.

The canyon is deep and full of thick trees so even an hour before sunset, I had fantastic soft light to shoot. I took over a hundred shots here, so It’s going to take some time to get the best published. In no particular order, this is my first shot.

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Early Saturday morning, I was tromping around in the shadow of Mount Lassen before sun up. I was shooting with @horse_mumbler and @treebud6048 so we were jockeying around the lake looking for own vision of the best shot. Not very satisfied with what I was seeing around the lake, I looked across the road and saw this really unique rock formation that grew right out of the ground. It was very brittle with many of the thinly stacked layers chipping away.

When on top, I saw this V that almost followed the reflection in the lake. The challenge was on. I was on a very uneven rock surface. So I began to position my tripod to line up the shot. I would check through the viewfinder, adjust, check, adjust and then check again. I found this shot after 12 adjustments to the tripod. I think it was worth it.

What do you think?

Woke up at 3, packed up the family and drove over to my Dad’s house. Picked him up and headed up to Lassen. We rolled through the south gate at 530. I had a big itinerary for sites I wanted to hit. Wanted to get first light at Helen Lake, run over and get King’s Creek Falls and then wrap it up at Bumpess Hell.

I’ve decided to adopt Lassen for a project. I think of photographers like Ansel Adams. He lived in Yosemite, so he was very intimate with the area and how it looked throughout the day. So I learned a few things today with where the light falls and I have a few new places I want to get some shots from. I want to know Lassen inside and out. Today I found that Helen lake isn’t in the right place to get Lassen under first light.

So all this talk about first light and I’m not sharing any this time. This shot I took right before we left after seeing everything on the itinerary. Some clouds rolled in, so I took this modest 4 frame panorama. I shot four shots vertically overlapping about 20 percent. I didn’t really have a good flat horizon to line it up against, so I just kept panning left and right making adjustments until it looked good edge to edge.

Using Lightroom’s compare feature from the Develop module, it lets you get two shots up side by side. I just normalized all of the exposures to prevent any vertical banding. This is just trial and error for me. I start with the middle shot and work my way out. When they’re all evenly exposed, I jump back into the grid view and select all four shots. Right-click, mouse-over “Edit In” and then click “Merge to Panorama in Photoshop”. This sends you to Photoshop with all four shots loaded into Photomerge. I used all of the defaults including Auto for the Layout. Clicked okay and let photoshop chew on this for a few minutes and it looks like this.

So I crop it down to remove all the uneven edges. If it looks good, I will merge all the layers together because it wants to use TIFF format to save and return back into Lightroom. Multi-layered TIFFs are extremely huge in the file size department and makes my network file server cry for mercy. Merging them keeps the file size manageable.

Once saved, it goes right into your Lightroom library where I make my normal corrections for exposure, contrast and color temperature.

My shot today is of a newly planted bare-root Catalpa Tree. They have very broad heart shaped leaves that are beautiful.

For processing, I applied Lightroom 3′s BnW preset simulating the use of a green filter. That was a fantastic starting point because that brought out so much texture and so many tones. From here, I really brought up the blacks. The shot already had good highlights. Since this was shot hand-held in pretty low light, the camera choose ISO 2500. Corrected this noise and I have a winner here.