Our Africa tour included a visit to Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe. We flew from Cape Town to Johannesburg and up to Victoria Falls and then drove to the beautiful Victoria Falls hotel where we stayed for three nights. The first evening I was there, I took a helicopter ride over the falls. I have not started editing those images yet. On day two of our stay there, we journeyed over to Botswana to the Chobe National park (the subject of yet another post). Today I’m going to post the first couple of images of our walk along the Victoria Falls park path which we did on day three of our visit; the day before boarding our Rovos train for our trip south to Pretoria.
The day was sunny and I didn’t take the tripod with me.. I figured I had all I could do to try and keep the camera dry for a few images. And I was right. The water spray from these gigantic waterfalls is unbelievable. You know you are in for a bath when they issue you rain gear at the entrance!
I decided to put the camera into the bracketing mode, as the lights and shadows of these gorges was quit intense. I was hoping to get a half way decent HDR blend with the brackets. BUT… that was not to be had either! Not only do these waterfalls create and enormous amount of water, but they create wind! So even with a very fast shutter speed, the leaves on most of the close trees and bushes are not in the same place between shots and even the Lightroom or Photoshop’s de-ghosting could not correct the amount of movement.
Soooo… that meant hand blending images to get a final product from the images I took.
Two of these three images are hand blended. That means I used two of the brackets as layers in Photoshop and masked out areas from one and revealed areas of the other until I got the perfect blend of lights and shadows. It just takes a lot of time… One of these images I was able to use just one of the captures and balance the shadows and highlights for a finished image. Much easier than blending two layers with masking.
But, if I want to get some final images out of my visit to Victoria Falls, this is the process I have to use. Here are my first three.
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