July 18, 2012
Alpine Waterfall in the San Juan National Forest, Colorado

Yesterday evening was the first time we had some color on the clouds and I took advantage of it by setting up at my favorite waterfall in the San Juan National Forest. This was a tricky scene to capture. I used the shift motion of the 17mm Tilt/Shift lens to look up at the waterfall while keeping the camera body vertical in order to avoid keystoning, and I used the tilt motion to align the plane of focus from the flowers to the top of the waterfall. I stopped down more than usual, to f13, to increase the depth of field to get the mountains in the distance as sharp as possible. Stopping down more would increase the depth of field more, but I wanted to avoid softening of the entire image due to diffraction which I start to notice at f16 on the 1Ds Mk III. Then I made three exposures (-1.5, 0, and +1.5) to capture detail from the bright sky to the dark foreground and then combined them by hand in Photoshop.