Return to home page Main Menu Navigation

Alberta Falls, Rocky Mountains #1

Alberta Falls in the Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado, U.S.A.

Click on the image for licensing terms

The story behind this image

One of the really nice things that my wife Liz and I enjoyed during our two week stay next to the Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado was chatting with local folk as we hiked along the various trails.

People were only too happy to stop and chat with a couple of Brits (they loved our accents for some reason), and we would ask for recommendations of good places to visit in the park.

We soon noticed a recurring theme - 'you must go and see the Alberta Falls, just along the Glacier Gorge trail'.

Well we weren't going to ignore such persistent urgings, so we decided to hike to the falls, have a look and a rest, and then follow the trail on to Mills Lake, higher up in the mountains.

The hike up to the falls was lovely in its own right, passing through groves of golden aspens and past majestic overlooks until we finally reached our destination.

It certainly was a popular spot, with about a dozen other hikers there at any one time, all busy taking photos from the spot shown here.

So we took it in turns to perch on the required rock for our shots, but the other photographers had to be extra patient with me as I set up my tripod.

Normally I would have just handheld the camera for a nice bright scene like this, but that was the problem, the scene was too bright in places like the sky and water, and very dark in others, like the surrounding rocks and trees.

I hadn't flown halfway round the world to take a mediocre photo of this iconic location, with burnt out highlights and blocked up shadows, so I took five separate exposures with my camera firmly fixed in place on the tripod for an HDR (high dynamic range) blend when I got back home.

After creating and toning the HDR blended image in Adobe Lightroom CC I was really pleased with how well the final picture turned out.

Well worth taking the extra effort for such a beautiful scene, and thanks to those other photographers for waiting so patiently!

License this image

Image data

Filename - rocky mountains alberta falls 01

Camera - Canon EOS 6D

Lens - 24-105mm zoom @ 47mm

Exposure - Various @ f16, ISO100

Location - Alberta Falls, Rocky Mountains

This image - 575x800px JPEG

Conversion - Adobe Lightroom

Comments - HDR rendition using five separate exposures