This photograph of the rogue river was made Saturday evening looking out over blossom bar. Traveling along the Lower Rogue has been a great addition to our adventure. As I write this I am in my tent camped just up from blossom bar. Marina and I opted to skip out on 20 or so miles of hiking through rolling hills of scrub oak. Instead we drove the car up in the mountains along an old, but well maintained forest road toward the Marial lodge. We stopped and stayed there for 2 nights then we got all our backpacking gear together and took off for two nights near blossom bar.
Blossom bar has been a great place to camp out. It has been nice to experience this area with no other hikers or rafters. We are the only people camped in the area.
For this shot I setup my tripod near the edge of the rock ridge that hangs over the water of the rogue river. My position allowed me an angle that looked straight up this meander of the river toward blossom bar. I wanted to accentuate the visual mass of the river so I framed the shot in portrait mode and not landscape. I got really lucky with the light this evening, a few frames before the light was completely different, flat clear and white. The sky provided a nice reflection and luminance in the river water below but the image really began to pop when the clouds began to turn orange and pink . This is what created the bright warm washed color in this image.
I used an 18 to 55mm lens set somewhere around 35mm. I also pulled out my graduated ND filter to pull the exposure of the sky back down so that it would expose correctly with the rest of the scene. In this image I wanted to get nice washed water in the river so I closed the aperture all the way down to f22 and dropped my shutter speed down to 3 seconds. This allowed the water to sweep through the frame and for the bright orange light to really build up in the waters reflection .