Smith Rock State Park

-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.

• 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.

• 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 :)

• 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..

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.

• 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.

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

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.