Photos

Wentworth Falls in the Blue Mountains is an easy one hour+ drive from the western suburbs of Sydney. Just south of the town of Wentworth Falls you can find the falls themselves. There are various trails that will allow you to get right to the falls or to the base, if you’re so inclined, or if its hot and you don’t want to do a lot of walking or climbing, you can park you car at Falls Reserve and walk down to the Princes Rock lookout and shoot across the chasm, as I did here.

Wentworth Falls are an impressive drop. They are reported to be 187 metres high, over 3 drops. For perspective, if you look down at the small lake at the base of this photo you can just make out somebody under the final left water fall and a couple of people on the rock. As a comparison Niagara Falls drops just 57 metres and the Angel Falls in Venezuela drops 979 metres. Of course there are some volume differences as well. In fact I visited this falls just 3 weeks prior to this shot and only the left side was running. The higher volume seen in this photo was there, as it had rained a couple of days before.

Much of this from: http://www.world-waterfalls.com/waterfall.php?num=292 and http://www.imaxniagara.com/niagara.html

This shot just becomes an appetizer for me. I hope someday to get back to try out some of the trails to the falls themselves, and get some more shots.

Workshop for this photo was as follows:
Shot in Raw, in the middle of the day with direct sun – used a polarizing filter to help cut the glare
Adjusted NEF shadows and highlights
Cropped to cut out some construction on the top
Adjusted levels slightly on the shadow side
Adjusted RGB curves
Adjusted colour curves
Increased contrast slightly
Overlay layer with 7% opacity brush used to darken highlights and light shadows (similar to dodging and burning)
Saved as tiff
Reduced image size, framed sharpened with smart sharpen and saved as jpeg for this post