• Edmund Burke.

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After a very cold and windy sunset at Sparks lake we decided to hit the landmark attraction of Bend, the Smith Rock State Park. The sheer cliffs of tuff and basalt are ideal for rock climbing of all difficulty levels. Smith Rock is generally considered the birthplace of modern American sport climbing and is host to cutting-edge climbing routes. It is popular for sport climbing, traditional climbing, multi-pitch climbing, and bouldering (source: wikipedia).

We had been here once before without much planning and got bamboozled by the morning light. It all has to do with the crooked river that snakes through the valley. During both sunset and sunrise, the sun will be behind massive rock formations and hence light can be tricky here. Last time we were here, the clouds were on the opposite side of the rock formations and all the color and texture were on the opposite side. Thankfully this time the cloud cover was much more uniform.

• Henry David Thoreau.

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Smith Rock near Bend, Oregon is a rock-climbing hot spot, and it’s also one of our favorite places to visit while we are in the area. While we were on our road trip to Washington last year, an unexpected snow storm caused us to abandon our plans for Mt Adams. A quick search while driving down got us a hotel room in Bend for a couple of days. We knew what our first destination would be and headed Straight for it well before sunrise.

The challenge with Smith Rock is the distance between interesting viewpoints. None of them are close together, and the view changes quite dramatically from one spot to the other. During my first visit here, we had a fantastic sunrise, but we didn’t have a place nailed down, so ended up taking a tremendous sunrise shot of the parking lot. I didn’t want that to happen during this visit and did some research on the best possible spot for sunrise and added sufficient time to walk there very slowly. The morning was fantastic, with stunning colors and dramatic cloud formations.

I’d have gone with the HDR route in the past but thankfully learned a bit about exposure blending and tried with this image. I loved how much more realistic the outcome is, and I am glad I invested the time in learning about it. I usually am very reluctant to learn more about photoshop, but I think every landscape photographer should spend some time exploring the possibilities of exposure blending.

This is Smith Rock, a state park in Oregon, and a world-renowned place for rock climbers (also lesser but still renowned place for photographers!)....

• Baltasar Gracian.

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This shot is of the beautiful Smith Rock State Park near Bend Oregon. I took this early this summer when we did a road trip to Washington state. Due to some inclement weather and an unexpected snowstorm, some of the roads around Mt Adamas were completely blocked and ruined some parts of our planned trip. So, we decided to drive straight to Bends and revisit some of our favorite spots around our favorite town in Oregon.

We reached the Smith Rock state park early morning before sunrise and had some of the best cloud formations we have ever see. The sun was coming up from behind us and the colors and light that were falling on the rock cliffs were nothing short of brilliant. I couldn’t use the ND filter here due to the very uneven horizon and that the fact that all my ND grads are Hard NDs. This would have been perfect for a soft ND grad, but since I didn’t have one, I used just a polarizer and a few metering tricks to get the exposure right. Most of the modern DSLR’s have excellent metering systems and the central weighted as well as the spot metering settings can be incredibly helpful in tricky situations. For this shot, I used the central weighted metering mode at the brightest spot in the sky and then used positive exposure compensation until the histogram looked right. I also wanted to give a shoutout to Nikon for finally getting a perfectly calibrated rear LCD and histogram on the D850, it’s a huge improvement over the over exposing rear screen of my D800.

• Dalai Lama.

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When we decided to cut short our road trip to Washington due to some foul weather we decided to hand at one of our favorite towns in all west coast instead of heading straight back to SoCal. So we headed to Bend Oregon and one of our favorite locations near Bend, the Smith Rock State Park. This park is a popular destination for rock climbers. We had a great morning here 2-3 years ago and wanted to see if we can land a repeat.

We reached the park well before sunrise and this time prepared a little bit better by doing some research using photopills. The problem with summer sunrises here is that the sun us completely behind the rock formations creating pretty intense shadows and overall high dynamic range scenes. I tried exposure blending in this image using luminosity masks, it’s a very tedious process compared to my usual edits, but the final images look much more natural than the overhanded HDR approach. Have a great day and thanks for visiting.