Franklin Falls

This weekend, I visited the popular Franklin Falls for the first time. This time of year, a visit requires a long walk up the closed access road, which isn't much to shout about aesthetically, although thankfully not particularly strenuous. The destination is definitely spectacular, especially in the snow, worth braving the throngs of other admirers.

Fortunately, the lighting was overcast during my visit. This kept the lighting contrast to a manageable level, enabling me to expose for both the snowy highlights and the shadows. The brightness of the snow, however, meant that my shutter speeds were not quite as slow as I would have liked (to blur the water, I would have wanted to try shutter speeds of perhaps 1-2 seconds). I resisted stopping down as much as I could have (to, say, f/22) due to the loss of image quality; slightly wider apertures gave me a sufficient depth of field for my compositions here. Even if I had stopped down, I might not have squeezed out 1-2 second exposure times.

I'll start the post with my two favorite views of the waterfall itself. I like these the best because they convey the most depth. In the first of these, I shot the waterfall at an angle. In the second, I zoomed sufficiently to treat the waterfall as a foreground and the surroundings as a background. F/18 and F/16, both 1/8 second.

Next, three more views of the falls. These don't convey as much depth as the first two, so I'm not quite as thrilled by them; on the other hand, they do more to put the waterfall in the context of its surroundings. All F/16, 1/8 second.

Finally, a view up what I believe is the snowbound South Fork Snoqualmie River (I'm unsure of the waterway's name at this location, just past the start of the actual trail). I'm on the fence about this composition - there's not a lot of color variation, obviously, and parts of the image are pretty busy. Ultimately, if the lines and subject matter are sufficiently well-defined, a more monochromatic landscape like this can still work on its own as a photographic composition (if not as, say, a jigsaw puzzle, as some of my readers can imagine). I'd have to see it in print to really know in this case. F/18, 1/6 second.