Upper North Falls

This is Upper North Falls at Silver Falls State Park, in Oregon. One of about ten waterfalls, this VR is my entry for the 2009 World Wide Panorama “Best Of” event. This particular entry was taken during an exploratory trip to the area with my daughter (barely visible taking some of her own pictures). It was taken in August, when the water flow was fairly low. We went to the same spot a few months later, after the rains had started and the flow was much higher. This made the waterfall itself more spectacular, but there was so much spray that we couldn’t get anywhere near it without getting soaked. Taking a VR would have been really hard, and of course the spot this one was taken at, was well under water!

(Click here to view the interactive picture in a new tab.)

This picture took the most processing of any I’ve made yet. The whites in the waterfall had no detail when starting; it took a bit of fiddling to get the water to have any structure.

I also experimented with sharpening a little. The WWP entry seemed to lose a lot of the result, perhaps because of the processing done to the entries, but I’m not sure. This picture looks better. The sharpening was done by splitting the panorama into six cube faces, so that the sharpening algorithm would be working on approximately square pixels. In an equirectangular image, which is the most common way to represent these pictures in a single file, there is significant distortion at the top and the bottom. I’m suspicious that sharpening won’t work correctly in those areas (although I’ve yet to do any real experimentation). So, I sharpened the cube faces instead.

There was also a bit of color tweaking, as usual. In retrospect, I would like to have taken the picture from in front of the log, so that I could have had more flexibility in setting up the initial picture. Maybe next time.