Category: Waterfalls and Cascades

Yesterday, I posted a photo of Bridal Veil Falls that I took on Wednesday. I shot the same scene two years ago and decided to compare them because I remember there used to be a big log near the “lagoon”. I was closer this time so I had to crop these two photos a bit to get them to show roughly the same area. 2023 is on the left. Note that 2023 shows two large logs but 2025 only shows one. Notice also that the one log from 2025 looks a lot like the lagoon log in the background of 2023. Notice, in 2025, in the center below the log is a large flat squarish rock. The same rock is in front of the other log in 2023. I think a serious rain came through here and washed one log downstream and moved the lagoon log to a new position. In fact, as I write this, I recall a serious 8 or 10 inch rain going through there a few months ago.

Wednesday after work, I hopped in the car and hightailed it to Bridal Veil Falls in Heber Springs. After all the rain over the weekend, I figured it was at or past peak. This was probably the most water I’ve seen there.

Cedar Creek Falls Sunday morning.

I usually use Adobe Lightroom for general photography and Adobe Photoshop for astrophotography. For landscapes, I often shoot exposure bracketed so that I can combine the three images into one more balanced image. With this image, the Lightroom HDR merge option resulted in a picture with blown out highlights and crushed blacks. So, I decided to try something I have been thinking about since I was processing total eclipse photos recently. That is to use Photoshop’s, “load stack” option to align three images and put them into a smart object and then use a stack mode of “mean”. Above is the result, no crushed blacks or blown out highlights.