Leon Turnbull Photography

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.