Leon Turnbull Photography

Neal, a photographer friend of mine from Australia, was visiting Lake Tahoe on vacation this past weekend, so I met up with him there for a morning photo shoot. He wanted to get that awesome sunrise shot overlooking Emerald Bay with some amazing colorful puffy clouds, just as the sun rises over the distant horizon. Yeah, right. God had other plans this weekend. It was overcast and rainy. The sun did not make an appearance all day, and hardly at all throughout the weekend. I feel bad for poor Neal. He comes all the way from Australia to Lake Tahoe, and has crummy weather all weekend. Apparently, he didn’t fare much better in San Francisco earlier in the week either. Ah well, it is really all his fault anyway, for bringing all that bad weather over here from Australia. 😉

Well, it wasn’t all that bad really. We had a fun time together this morning, shooting at three different locations. It was overcast, as you can tell from the photo, and the rain was just drizzling for the most part, so it wasn’t awful at all. This shot was taken from the brink of the falls (obviously) overlooking the Bay, just around sunrise. Can’t you see all the beautiful sunshine? 🙂 Neal was a bit antsy (and rightfully so) about getting too close to the edge of the waterfall. I think he thought I was much too close for comfort, though i didn’t feel that I was in an unsafe position whatsoever. Standing at the edge of Eagle Falls doesn’t bother me as it would at certain other waterfalls (at Bassi Falls, for eg., I would be totally freaked out standing this close to the edge).

This is South Branch Grouse Creek Falls, which I found on my trek to the bottom of Grouse Falls. South Branch Grouse Creek drops steeply into this canyon, and joins up with Grouse Creek below Grouse Falls. This cascade is found just before the confluence of the two creeks.

Now I had an interesting email exchange with someone recently who told me they had been down to the bottom of Grouse Falls a couple times back in the ’70s, on a Sierra Club hike led by a man named Gene Markley. He couldn’t remember too many details, but indicated there had been a maintained trail leading straight down to the falls. There was no overlook at that time, of course. I was intrigued. Where did this trail start from? Why is it no longer in use? I googled Markley to try to find out more. I couldn’t find any recent information on him, but I did learn that he wrote some books back in the ’70s. One of them I was able to buy a used copy of on-line, called Bogus Thunder Mountains, which was written in 1976.

It is a collection of short essays about the Northern Sierra Nevada, and Placer County in particular. It is an absolutely fascinating book. He is a very entertaining writer; people just don’t write like this anymore. And it includes some very interesting history of this area. He has one essay about “Hunting Waterfalls”, of which I want to quote some parts to you because I thought it was so neat:

“It is concluded among all mighty hunters that tracking a mountain puma or trailing a bear is the ultimate sport … I’ll have to disagree. It, in fact, cannot hold a candle to waterfall hunting! … Waterfall hunting should be done in parties of not less than two or more than six. Solo waterfall hunting is forbidden, becasuse a lone man is no match for the canyon walls or face of peaks [my wife likes that part] … It is, in fact, a rough sport, and one should be ready for the worst. The hunter should be in good condition and be able to move through brush, talus slopes, and slides. Most important is that they still have enough ‘umph’ left to climb out of the gorge or off the mountain at the close of the day. Often you can hear a fall roaring for almost a mile, but approaching it is something else. This is where mountain know-how comes in and proper leadership becomes of utmost importance. The fall cannot be considered captured until you are actually being bathed by the wind-blown spray from the falling water. The next thing is to get yourself in a comfortable position to watch the water tumble, slide, and fall off the mountain or canyon wall. Then, it’s all yours and you have bagged it …

Everytime I think of bagging a waterfall, I think of Grouse Falls … That’s the biggest one I have ever captured. It’s a big one, only a handful of people have ever seen this fall [not true anymore obviously, but how many have really ‘bagged’ it as Markley has?] … The stream comes spilling down Grouse Canyon, dropping from one pool to another, when suddenly it shoots down a curved trough between two twenty-foot rock faces and begins to fall and fall. After a hundred foot leap, it hits and bounces off another two hundred feet, then tumbles, splitting into two separate falls. The water comes dashing down into a rock pool that allows it to spill down through a wild cataract for about one hundred fifty feet, ending up in a huge containing pool which stores the water for a slight second before allowing it to escape over a seventy foot vertical fall. Here the rushing waters disappear into a large green pool surrounded by mossy rock slabs. The river then starts to flow again, spilling its way down into the wilds of the North Fork of the Middle Fork of the American River. The fall has a total vertical drop of imovane about five hundred feet. Anybody for a waterfall hunt? ”

Awesome. That is what I call describing a waterfall. I sure wish I could write like that.

I have one more portion of a different essay I would like to share. This one is just for my friend, Brian:

“The mountain lion, or puma, of the Sierra is the most spendid animal of the wild world … He has been known to spring a distance of twenty feet and can drop from a sixty foot perch to down a deer. He travels approximately twenty miles a night during his hunt, which is normally for weak old deer. He has never been known to attack man and is rarely seen by humans. As in Africa, where he is king of the beasts, he is in the Sierra the greatest of all animals. The mountain lion is on the decline in Placer County and in another generation, only tales will recall this magnificent creature … it was my first puma sighting, and although I hope to repeat it someday, I know the big cats will go the way of the California grizzly … in his usual greed, man destroys all – even the King of beasts.”

So after Lion Slide Falls, Brian had to get on to work. Poor guy. My fate this day, however, was even worse than that. I had a dentist appointment. I broke my tooth a couple weeks ago, and I needed to get a crown. This would be part I of the procedure, the worst part. For those of you who do not know, my dentist also happens to be my father-in-law. It is actually really nice having a dentist as a father-in-law, as long as you are nice to his daughter. I wasn’t looking forward to having a crown procedure done without any novocaine, so I made sure to be extra specially nice to Tara this past week. Seriously though, I think I have been pretty nice to Tara over the past 9 years of our marriage, at least I hope she thinks so. 😉 Today happens to be our 9 year wedding anniversary!! And it has been a very wonderful 9 years for me (again, I do hope she thinks so too!). And as for my dentist, he is truthfully a very excellent dentist, the best dentist I have ever had in my entire life (and I am not just saying that because I have to!). It will be quite sad for us when he ever decides to retire. However, I’m not sure he ever will. He is 70 years old now, and still going strong.

So anyway, I had until 2PM until my appointment, so I decided to swing by Potem Falls before I went back. This is a spectacular 69 ft. high waterfall dropping into the Pit River Arm of Lake Shasta. In the summer, it has a fabulous hole for swimming at the base of the falls here. And when I was here this day, it was possible to get across and in the creek for different compositions of the waterfall.

This particular photo is actually a composite image of three photos stitched together, which increased the resolution of the image to 25.1 megapixels. This is pretty much one of the first photos for which I have done this (the first one I like, anyway). Essentially, I took three horizontal shots at 40mm, and stitched them together to produce one single vertical high resolution image. Why would I do this? Well, the main reason for doing something like this is so I have the ability to create very large prints for my gallery. With the Canon 5D standard 12 megapixel image, I can create prints up to, maybe, 20×30 size and not really any larger. But I have been wondering (and some clients have also asked me) about being able to create even larger prints, as some professionals do (who use medium and large format cameras). So with this 25 megapixel stitched image, I now have the ability to create an even larger print, which I may do in the future. At the size I show this photo on the web you cannot really see the increased resolution, but it would be (or should be) very apparent on a large print.

In addition, this is actually a HDR image as well. So I actually took 15 separate exposures (5 each for each of the 3 sections of the photo), used Photomatrix to blend the 5 exposures together (carefully), then stitched the resulting 3 HDR images together to create one high resolution image. It worked out incredibly well, much better than I expected, but it is quite a lot of work to create. I do not plan to do this for all my images in the future. But I will do it again, I think, for certain special images.

Took a quick trip up to Lion Slide Falls in northern California this past weekend. I met my friend Brian there at about 5:30AM, and we walked up to the falls to take some sunrise shots. Only a photographer is insane enough to get up this early in the morning, and thus Brian is about as insane as I am. He’s a pretty decent photographer too, or so he thinks (just kidding, Brian!). He is also completely paranoid about wild animals such as cougars and the like. So much so, that he bought a long hiking stick that is actually a spear, in order to combat any such animal that thinks he would be tasty enough for breakfast. He has yet to use it (which I guess is lucky for him, and lucky for the animals as well).

Anyway, Lion Slide Falls is a nice little 24 ft. high waterfall along Hatchet Creek near the town of Montgomery Creek. It is a popular swimming hole in the summer, and Hatchet Creek flows well throughout the year. When the creek is very high, you can’t even get up to the falls. But if not, it is easy to get up to the falls without getting your feet wet. But of course, I (and Brian too of course) did get my feet wet, in order to try to get a better photograph. The creek was not all that cold, surprisingly. Compared to freezing Eagle Creek at Tahoe, Hatchet Creek was like putting my feet in a hot tub (well, not quite). I also managed to lose my lens cap in the creek here, and had to watch as it floated nicely down stream and out of my sight. Well, at least it wasn’t my camera (or my camera bag, like that lady at Eagle Falls).

The big log in the middle of Lion Slide Falls is a “trademark” feature of this waterfall. It has been firmly entrenched on this waterfall for a very long time, and I suspect it will be there for a long time to come. I may be wrong, but I think it got situated there as a direct result of the forest fire that occurred here in ’96 and/or the huge floods of ’97. But that was slightly before my time.

From a few weeks ago, here is another image of Boulder Creek Falls. This is the middle section, which is 26 ft. high. Boulder Creek Falls drops in 3 separate sections. The lowest is the largest fall, but unfortunately you can’t see all 3 cascades in a single view. The nice thing, though, is that the trail climbs from the bottom right up to the top of the falls, so it is easy to see the upper sections.

Speaking of trails, a lot has been done at Whiskeytown Natl. Rec. Area, to improve the trails in the park. I credit this to the park superintendent, Jim Milestone, a great guy whom I met a couple years ago, when he gave my wife and I a personal guided tour to Whiskeytown Falls before the trail was opened to the public. At Boulder Creek Falls, there is now a bench, plus a guided handrail so you can easily get right up to the base of the falls at the bottom. When I was here previously, it was difficult to get to the bottom of the falls without getting your feet all wet. They also cut away a huge log at the waterfall in an attempt to improve the scenic aspect of the waterfall, but they do need to do a lot more here. There is just so many branches and logs all over the place. If they could somehow get rid of them, this waterfall might actually be quite aesthetic to view and photograph.