Photos

Erskine Falls found just north of Lorne and close to the Great Ocean Road, has one of the highest drops and is probably one of the best known waterfalls in the Otways. The drop is 30 metres into the lush tree fern gully you see before you. I visited these falls probably at the worst time possible. It was at the end of summer when the rainfall is lowest. As well we are still under the influence of El Nino conditions (dryer conditions for western Pacific). This is expected (hoped) to change through 2007 to cooler La Nina conditions which can bring wetter than normal conditions. All this being the case these falls may be more impressive (with more water) towards the September timeframe. Still I was impressed with the valley itself and its lush nature. You can see the falls in this shot more as a trickle coming down the lush green back wall.

Much of this from:
http://www.lornelink.com.au/templates/3.asp?ID=67&frommap=1 and
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/enso/#impacts

The workflow for this one was as follows:
I took two shots (in Raw), one for shadows and one for highlights; both of these were at 27 mm, F22. The first was 1.5 seconds, the second was 3 seconds.
In processing the NEF files I allowed shadows on the 1.5 second shot, and I allowed the highlights to be blown on the 3 second shot
I did an HDR merge and left the white point pretty well wide open
Levels were adjusted (slight)
Colour curves were adjusted (with a little more light to the shadows and more contrast to the green)
Used an overlay layer with opacity 5% brush for burn and dodge
Still a little grey so I added a saturation layer (20% to master)
Added a layer for sharpening and “over-sharpened” with Smart Sharpen
Modified sharpening with a layer mask (15% opacity black brush)
Saved as a tiff
For this post, further sharpened for the reduced size (slight), framed, and saved as a jpeg