Leon Turnbull Photography

I woke up at the insane hour of 3AM on Saturday to get out to Lake Tahoe and Eagle Falls for sunrise. I arrived at the falls an hour before sunrise. My goal was *not* to shoot sunrise at the top of the falls (which I have done before), but instead, to shoot the falls in the dark. It didn’t really work out as I had envisioned the shot. I think I was really too late. It was dark, but there was too much light on the horizon. I think I really should have been there a couple hours earlier even (like that is ever going to happen). Nonetheless, this photo still turned out particularly well in the pre-dawn hour. It is a 30 second exposure. I am definitely very pleased with it.

I was not the only one at Eagle Falls this morning. In a way, this was surprising because I have never seen anyone else here at sunrise before. But on the other hand, it is really a popular and well known spot, made famous by the late photographer, Galen Rowell. So this other older lady from Nevada was there with her son, trying to find a spot alongside me. There are really not too many “good” spots to setup here, and they ended up walking right in front of my camera view while I was taking a night exposure. Ugh. But I was not planning to stay for the sunrise anyway, so after taking my night shots, I gave up my spot for them. And off I went to my desired location, down to the bottom of the falls. But this was not the last I heard from these two.

After shooting Eagle Falls from the bottom (those pics will be posted soon), I climbed back up to the top, well after sunrise, and I figured those two would’ve been long gone. But no, they were still there. They hollered me down, asking if they could use my cell phone. It seems that the lady had slipped and fallen in the creek above the falls, and lost her camera bag, which went over the falls! She managed to hold on to her camera around her neck without getting it wet, all the while holding onto a flimsy branch. I don’t know how close she came to going over the falls herself, but I do know many people have died here before. It can be very dangerous here, if you are not very careful. In the camera bag was her zoom lens, various camera accessories, and her car keys. They used my phone to call AAA to come get her car unlocked, as she said she had a spare key in the trunk. So if you are down at the bottom of Eagle Falls in the near future, and you find a camera bag with a water logged Nikon zoom lens in it, you now know how it got there.