Deschutes County

• Antoine de Saint-Exupery.

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Enough with the woodland photographs, today lets talk about my bread and butter landscape location—the High deserts of the west coast. And today's shot comes from the Smith Rock State Park in Oregon. This is one location that we have visited on every trip to the beautiful beaver state. The rock formation is just absolutely stunning, and along with that, Smith Rock is a prime spot for spectacular sunset or sunrise shots.

The first time we visited the park was in 2013, and I had just updated my gear from a crop sensor D7000 to full-frame D800 along with a brand new 24-70 f2.8, and I was hoping for the image quality to take a jump. The expected increase in image quality did not happen. I had to discard a lot of the images because the 36 megapixels of the D800 demanded better technique than the 16 MP D7000. The 24-70 f2.8 was heavy, and the depth of field was shallower. This made sharp frames a challenge. So all in all, not a great first outing.

But I was ready when we returned the second time. I had time to get familiar with my camera gear, and my technique had improved quite a lot. I got way more keepers on this trip, but there we still a lot of photographs that I had to discard. Then I attended some post-processing & workflow classes and understood the importance of having a good workflow and sound post-processing. Now that I have some time on my hands, I revisited some of my old shots. By far, this has been the best skillset I have added as a photographer. Today's image was a stitched panorama of about five images taken in portrait orientation. The first time I post-processed the picture, it looked way too saturated and artificial that I decided not to post it anywhere. But I liked the composition too much and decided to re-process the image. I am much happier with the result. It is way closer to the actual sunrise we encountered that beautiful summer morning. I hope you all enjoy it as well.

Running up and down the trail around the lake trying to decide where the best sunrise shot might occur. Tripping over my own tripod, just another day of photography in my life.

Located in the heart of Central Oregon just 25 miles west of Bend, Sparks Lake is a large, shallow lake. Situated near the northwest edge of Mount Bachelor, the lake boasts spectacular views of Broken Top and South Sister in addition to Mount Bachelor. Sparks Lake was formed by volcanic activity in the area over 10,000 years ago. Pristine alpine streams flow into this beautiful lake.

I see that Flickr decided to name this Elk Lake on the map. Nope, it's Sparks Lake!

At the McKenzie Pass in the Willamette National Forest.

• Virgil.

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On our second trip to Oregon, we got a chance to visit some fantastic spots in the green state of Oregon. One of the amazing towns that we stayed over was called Bend. The name really attracted us on the map plus it was good base camp for our exploration of various central Oregon attractions. On our second day there I noticed a huge billboard outside our motel that advertised about various tourist attractions accessible from Bend and it had an otherworldly picture of a lake with majestic mountains and some spectacular clouds. I tried figuring out where that location was but between the spotty internet connection and our crazy schedule had not much luck.

Once back in LA, I still remembered the place and launched a lot of internet searches until I finally landed on the image. That image was taken at Sparks lake and the mountains visible were South Sister and Broken top. Therefore, on our next trip we spend a beautiful morning there shooting the mountains and the calm lake reflections. We didn’t have any cloud cover on that day, so I was a bit disappointed that I didn’t get the full potential image. So, when our trip to Washington ran into some unforeseen snow storm on the mountains, we decided to reroute the trip to Bend and try our luck at sunset. We reached just before sunset after driving all day and found the day to be extremely cloudy and windy. My wife didn’t have high hopes, but I knew the wind was a game changer. As sunset neared the wind intensified and started to warp the cloud cover into a lenticular cloud. It was cold and windy, but we were in place waiting for the cloud to get perfect, but it was too dark by the time the wind died down and the cloud cover tuned into a perfect lenticular. In the meantime, I took this shot of the beautiful scene while there was still come color in the sky.

As seen from the viewpoint right next to parking lot. Taken after first light.

With a sheer plunge of 89 feet, Tumalo Falls is both the tallest and most impressive waterfall along Tumalo Creek - as well as one of the most popular outdoor destinations in the vicinity of Bend. The area around the falls was burnt in a 1979 forest fire, though like the landscape surrounding Mount St. Helens after it's devastating 1980 eruption, the forest is quickly healing. A few snags still line the hillsides along the valley but the area is green again, covered with small fir trees and not at all detracting from the splendor of the falls. A nice set of viewpoints both at the top and near the base of the falls make viewing the falls possible for nearly everyone.

• 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.

-Christian Nestell Bovee.

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One of the problems of living in beautiful southern California is the absolute lack of clouds in the sky. Other than the marine layer that happens during the summer, the sky is often blue with a good supply of smog. I have found this to be true even after a rain or in the morning. This also means that one of my favorite filters, the LEE 10-stop ND, almost never see any use when we are touring locations near Socal.

So, I relish my opportunities when I am at a location where there are clouds and their motion is creating some drama in the sky. This shot was taken at the smith rock state park near Bend, Oregon. The morning we visited, I noticed that the sky still had some cloud cover in the morning and the wind was whipping the clouds around creating some amazing motion in the sky. So finally I had a chance to get the 10 stop ND out and capture all the fun stuff happening in the sky.

This shot was taken using a 10 stop ND to capture the motion in the sky and a 1 stop ND grad to balance the light in the sky and the rocks. I metered the scene on the clouds and calculated the 11 stops that I had to compensate manually. Focusing was also set manually on the rock cliffs. Color correction done in photoshop included setting the white balance of the image to compensate for the blue tinge that often comes with Lee Big Stopper.

• Francis of Assisi.

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This shot of the incomparable Sparks Lake is arguably my favorite shot from our summer road trip to Oregon. When you compare all the little spots in the US which we have explored Bend, OR has to be right up there on the top of the list as one of the most interesting little towns for a photographer. A short drive to the west will find you in the foothills of the Cascade Range and within hiking distances of many Alpine lakes while a drive east will provide access to desert wonders like Fort Rock and painted hills.

I made this shot at the beautiful Sparks Lake, which is an easily accessible lake with camping facilities and all around stunning view of the South Sister (visible in this image) along with Broken Top and Mt Bachelor. This shot was taken about 30 minutes after sunrise when the warm morning light started to filter in through the caved part of Broken Top. I was really glad I stuck around for this shot.

This pretty waterfall splashes about 23 feet into a small gorge just downstream from a rather dusty campground, it's located at an elevation of about 4750 feet. Upstream of the falls, Paulina Creek flows through pretty grassy meadows - more scenery well worth the attention of your camera.

Paulina Creek is undersized for the features found along the channel, it’s average annual discharge is 18 cubic feet per second. Between 2000 and 4000 years ago a small waterfall reached Paulina Lake and dropped the lake’s level by about 8 feet. This resulted in a flood with an estimated discharge rate of about 7000 cubic feet per second (almost 400 times the annual rate). The flood lasted no more than two days. This flood formed the many large scale features found along Paulina Creek. Here at McKay Crossing Falls during the flood there was a falls almost 100 feet wide.

Cline Falls is one of the highest waterfalls along the Deschutes River in Central Oregon. It is a steep segmented cascade. The falls drop approximately 20 ft (6.1 m) through several channels carved into the basalt cliff that cuts crosses the riverbed. The falls are approximately 50 ft (15 m) wide with an average flow of 200 cu ft/s (5.7 m3/s). However, the flow over the falls varies throughout the year as a result of irrigation water being taken out of the river above the falls during the summer. The falls have a forward run of about 50 ft (15 m), descending at 77-degree angle through the cataract.

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!)....

• 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.

• Edna St. Vincent Millay.

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Beautiful Smith Rock State Park located at Bend, Oregon. This picture is a panorama stitch combining about 4 shots in portrait mode stitched together as a landscape shot. This is such a stunning location personally I don’t feel like I have done justice to the beauty of this place. I would love to visit here again when the sunlight hits the rocks directly, hopefully sometime other than summer.

Thanks for visiting have a nice day..

Got really lucky that the morning was so calm and the water was still, except for the occasional duck. On the left is the South Sister and on the right is Broken Top.

Located in the heart of Central Oregon just 25 miles west of Bend, Sparks Lake is a large, shallow lake. Situated near the northwest edge of Mount Bachelor, the lake boasts spectacular views of Broken Top and South Sister in addition to Mount Bachelor. Sparks Lake was formed by volcanic activity in the area over 10,000 years ago. Pristine alpine streams flow into this beautiful lake.

Sparks Lake is a natural body of water near the crest of the central Cascade Range in Deschutes County.

• Heraclitus.

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On our first trip to Oregon, we spend most of our time exploring the wonderful Oregon coast and Columbia river gorge, but as we started our journey back, I had a couple of spots n mind for a quick visit. One such location was the lower proxy falls, a massive waterfall near Bend, Oregon. The drive to the falls trailhead was long but beautiful. Inline with most aspen landscapes, we were driving on the road snaking through a dense pine forest for the most part.

Then suddenly, the landscape changed. Instead of the lush green forest, the area opened up and drove through a massive lava field. I have never seen anything like that before, and when we saw what appeared to be some building with a parking lot, we decided to stop and learn a bit about this stark but gorgeous landscape. The building we saw turned out to be the Dee Wright Observatory, an observation structure at McKenzie Pass's summit in the Cascade Mountains of Oregon. The facility is an open shelter constructed with lava stone. It is located amid a large lava flow and offers an exceptional view of numerous Cascade peaks.

I saw this scene just outside the observatory. It shows the distant peaks of the middle and north sister mountains and the direction of the ancient lava flow. What interested me the most was how nature was reclaiming the rough rocky terrain. As we went on one of the many trails that start from these locations, you could see more signs of greenery returning with little plants and flowers all over the place.

Love prefers twilight to daylight...

• Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

One of the best things I like about Oregon is how unassuming some of the most stunning locations are. The first time we visited Oregon, we spend a couple of days in Bend but completely missed the stunning Sparks lake. On our second visit, luckily I saw a billboard for Oregon tourism with sparks lake as the main attraction but in true Oregon fashion, they didn't name the location. Thankfully my google tracking skills were on point and I managed to find this lovely location and we spend a brilliant sunrise there.

This happened with Abiqua Falls as well and we in fact turned back about a mile away from one of the most famous waterfalls in the state because we couldn't figure out the turn to the parking lot. Yup, there was not a single sign, I figured it out a year later and returned to get my pics and was kicking myself for turning around while I was so close. While it was frustrating at the moment, as I look back I really appreciate how these spots still maintain their wildness by not being tourist traps.

• 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.

• Zhuangzi.

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One of the surprise locations of our Oregon trip was the stunningly beautiful Sparks Lake near the cozy little town of Bend. It was not really part of my original trip itinerary but I added it based on a photo I saw n a Bend travel brochure. I was a bit unsure about the location until we drove into Bend and saw huge panoramic shots of Sparks lake on a huge billboard.

This is not a particularly hard location to shoot as pretty much anywhere you look you have stunning vistas. The challenge is to take pics which convey the grandness of scene. I wanted to take a panorama shot, the moment I saw this scene and once the rising sun obliged with morning light that streamed over the mountain peaks. Hope you all like it.

• Alfred Lord Tennyson.

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The main reason why Bend Oregon, is one of our favorite towns to visit on the west coast is due to the diversity of its landscape. A short drive to the west will get you into alpine lakes, active volcanos, and coniferous forests while a trip to the east will get you to the deserted part of the state. There are amazing formations like gigantic lava bubbles that burst to form rocky fort formations and rolling hills that got covered in multi-colored ashes during the various volcanic eruptions caused by the cascade mountain range.

We found our favorite location near Bend only on our second trip, and it’s the beautiful sparks lake. If you would have asked me to sketch the perfect alpine landscape scene, I am pretty sure that the sketch will match the view from the shores of Sparks Lake. No wonder that it’s the poster child for Bend’s tourism board. This photo is from our first visit to the beautiful lake, we drove here for sunrise, but I had no particular locations in mind for sunrise shots. My wife was not feeling well, so we decided that she would rest in the car, so I was on my own for the day. The nearest spot I found was lovely, but after taking some shots there, I got bored of the location, so I moved on, after a short hike, I found a ledge from which I could see the view of a rock outcropping with a tine tree hanging on for dear life. I decided to make the tiny tree my foreground element that will provide the depth required to anchor the whole scene.

Smith Rock State Park is an American state park located in central Oregon's High Desert near the communities of Redmond and Terrebonne. Its 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.

The geology of Smith Rocks is volcanic. It is made up of layers of recent basalt flows overlaying older Clarno ash and tuff formations. Approximately 30 million years ago, a large caldera was formed when overlying rock collapsed into an underground lava chamber. This created a huge amount of rock and ash debris that filled the caldera. That material solidified into rock, becoming Smith Rock tuff. Rhyolite flows intruded along faults in the Smith Rock Tuff. A half million years ago, basalt lava flows from nearby volcanoes covered the older tuff.

More recently, the Crooked River cut its way through the layers of rock to create today's geographic features. Smith Rock itself is a 3,200-foot (980 m)-high ridge (above sea level) with a sheer cliff-face overlooking a bend in the Crooked River (elev. 2600 ft), making the cliffs about 600 feet high

In the background from left to right are South Sister, Broken Top and hidden behind the trees is Mt Bachelor.

Lava Lake lies in the Cascade Range about 25 miles (40 km) west-southwest of Bend in Oregon. It is a close neighbor of Little Lava Lake, from which it is separated by solidified lava. Lava Lake is at an elevation of 4,740 feet (1,440 m) in the Deschutes National Forest. The lake covers 368 acres (149 ha) to an average depth of 20 feet (6.1 m).

Lava Lake, Little Lava Lake, and other nearby lakes were formed after lava flows from Mount Bachelor altered drainage patterns in the area. Solidified lava flows are visible along the shorelines of both lakes, and the volcanic peaks Broken Top and South Sister can be seen to the north.

Taken at second viewpoint after you start up the Tumalo trail. Taken after first light but before dawn.

With a sheer plunge of 89 feet, Tumalo Falls is both the tallest and most impressive waterfall along Tumalo Creek - as well as one of the most popular outdoor destinations in the vicinity of Bend. The area around the falls was burnt in a 1979 forest fire, though like the landscape surrounding Mount St. Helens after it's devastating 1980 eruption, the forest is quickly healing. A few snags still line the hillsides along the valley but the area is green again, covered with small fir trees and not at all detracting from the splendor of the falls. A nice set of viewpoints both at the top and near the base of the falls make viewing the falls possible for nearly everyone.

• 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.

• John Ruskin.

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When we decided to drive back from our trip to Washington, we knew that we needed a stopover in between to take a break and since we had couple of days thanks to inclement weather in the Southern Cascades, we decided to stop over at Bend, Oregon. I wanted to get to two of the iconic locations near Bend, Smith Rock state park and Sparks Lake.

We reached Smith Rock around 5am in the morning, well before the first climbers arrived and scopped out some of the hiking trails around to find some photo spots. This one is the most classic view of the rock formations and I took this shot just before the sunrise. The sliver of light was giving a nice glow to the storm clouds that were trapped by the mammoth rock formations. After this shot we pretty much sprinted with all our gear to get to the other locations we scopped out earlier while the light was still good. All in all, we had an amazing time in this park.

• Jean de La Fontaine.

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This shot was taken near Bend Oregon at the stunning Sparks Lake. This Lakes location just so stunning that there are about a million different viewpoints here. Also, the trail covering some of the best views of the lake and the surrounding peaks of the Cascade range is named in memory of the famous photographer Ray Atkeson (more details about his work can be found here www.rayatkeson.com/).

I have a bit of history with this spot as the last time we were there we had witnessed a stunning sunrise and in my haste, I focused most on the light at the top of the peak of South Sister. That resulted in the poor framing of the tree that was growing out of the rocky shoreline as I placed it below the horizon making it lost in the shadows. For some reason that irked me a lot about that shot and when we went back to the lake during this year’s road trip, I wanted to rectify that little oversight. This time though we had some excellent colors and truly unique cloud cover completely engulfing the peak of the mountain. So I used my Lee Big Stopper and slowed the exposure times a bit.

• Hugh Leonard.

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The stunning smith rock state park, the day we visited the park we had a stunning sunrise with beautiful light and wonderful clouds. The only problem was that it was directly opposite this scene. But after the brilliant display of light behind us was over the whole park was basked in a pink glow for about 5 minutes. Summer is usually not a great time to take sunrise shots here as the rocks remain in the shadows.

I hope to return here again and hopefully the clouds will be in front of the rocks :)

• Antoine Rivarol.

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This shot was taken at the beautiful Sparks lake during our second road trip of Oregon. The first time we visited, I didn’t even know that this place existed and spend a couple of days in Bend visiting other more famous attractions around the area. On the last day we were leaving I noticed this Bend tourism poster with a beautiful lake on it and recognized the broken top mountain. I asked around and surprisingly few people knew about it. Finally, I met a fellow photographer who gave me the name of the lake and I made a point to include it as a must-have spot the next time we visited Oregon.

And three years later we were at the beautiful lakeshore of the stunning Sparks Lake. Unfortunately, my wife fell ill the day before and had a miserable morning at the park. I had to frantically look for a good spot while she rested up in the car. I found this spot which was a short stroll from the parking lot and took this panorama stitch image of warm morning light slowly filling on the mountainside. The water was perfectly still that morning and I got the almost perfect reflection.

Panorama of South Sister and Broken Top mountains across Sparks Lake during Sunrise, Deschutes National Forest, Oregon, USA.

I don't know how good,...