Sun Coming Out Over Brandywine Falls
Landscapes,  Photo Stories

Photo Story: Sun Coming Out Over Brandywine Falls

It was cloudy all morning as I was trying to capture the fall colors in Cuyahoga Valley National Park.  I made several previous stops and there was no sunrise.

I decided to make one last stop at Brandywine Falls, one of the top attractions in Cuyahoga Valley National Park.  I had taken several photographs with my Olympus 12-40mm f2.8 lens and decided to take a few photos with my fisheye lens before leaving the falls.

Sun Coming Out Over Brandywine Falls

Just as I started to compose the shot with the Rokinon 7.5mm fisheye, the sun peaked out of the clouds still low in the sky.  I was at the end of the boardwalk close to the falls and the fisheye lens let me get a good wide angle composition of the falls, gorge, and sun burst through the trees.

The Rokinon 7.5mm Fisheye lens is a manual focus Micro Four Thirds Lens so I used focus peaking on the Olympus OM-D to ensure the entire scene was in focus.  The Rokinon 7.5mm F3.5 Fisheye Lens is an inexpensive ($249) way to add a fisheye lens to your micro four thirds lineup of lenses.

The address for Brandywine Falls is 8176 Brandywine Road, Sagamore Hills, Ohio.  The GPS for the falls is 41.276874, -81.538573.  The falls are accessible from the parking lot using a wooden boardwalk and stairs.

Brandywine Falls Photo Details

Camera:  Olympus OM-D E-M1
Lens:   Rokinon 7.5mm Fisheye Lens
Focal Length: 7.5mm
ISO:  200
Aperture:   f/11
Shutter Speed: 1/20th of a second
Exposure Compensation: +0
Lighting: Cloudy Morning with the sun just peaking thru the clouds

Waterfall Photo Post Processing

  • Cropped the photo, manually correced the distortion, and lightened the shadows in Lightroom 5.
  • Used the Color and Contrast Boost III filter in Topaz Clarity to bring out the colors in the photo and increase contrast.
  • Selectively lightened and darkened the image using Viveza 2 from Google.
  • In Color Efex Pro 4, I Used the Detail Extractor Filter.
  • Removed the fence line and boardwalk railing from the photo using the Clone Stamp tool in Photoshop CC 2014.
  • Selectively removed noise from the photo using Topaz DeNoise and a layer mask in Photoshop CC 2014.
  • Selectively sharpened the image using the Unsharp Mask filter and a layer mask in Photoshop CC 2014.  I copied the layer mask from the prior step and inverted it.

Written by Martin Belan

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