This amazing location required a 4:00 AM wake-up and a cross country hike through grizzly country in the dark up on Logan Pass in Glacier National Park. It was well worth the effort. Streams cascading off all sides of a bowl shaped valley converge at this narrow slot in the rocks. During the summer, melt water flows off the canyon walls in several places creating four of five separate falls, but in the fall just the two main falls remain.

I first became aware of this waterfall from Galen Rowell’s classic photograph. A couple of years ago it ran on the cover of Outdoor Photographer Magazine and included the following caption: “Light conditions like this are notoriously difficult to photograph. The contrast between the sky and the shadowed ground is too much for film or an image sensor to handle. At the time Rowell made this image, he used a split neutral-density filter to control the contrast. If he was alive and photographing the same scene today, Rowell would have used a digital camera. He’d have known that he could employ some sophisticated RAW-software techniques to double-process the image file.”

I took that advice and photographed the classic scene in two separate exposures, one for the sky and one for the dark foreground and then manually blended the two images in Photoshop to allow the entire range of light that I experienced to all be contained within a single image.

The magazine caption also noted the irony that in a location famous for being on the continental divide, a place where water usually flows in opposite directions, toward the east or the west, would also be a place where so many streams flow together.

Two exposure manual blend. Canon EOS 5D, Canon 16-35mm f/2.8 lens, 3 stop Sing-Ray split neutral density filter, circular polarizer, 3.2 sec @ f/10 (sky), 15 sec @ f/10 (fore ground), ISO 100