Moordener Kill Water Falls
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[twentytwenty]
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Moordener Kill Water Falls
Despite living in the area for fifteen years, this was my first trip to the Moordener Kill Water Falls. The springtime whitewater runoff was roaring over the dam and headed towards the Hudson River about a mile away.
The Technical Layer
To read additional technical and location content please click on the tabs below.
Technical: Camera Settings
Technical: How & Gear
For making this image, I used the Nikon D5 and a 70-200 lens. I setup using my RRS tripod and put a 6stop darken filter made by Breakthrough to slow my shutter speed.
Technical: Location & Inspiration
Any fast moving river with wet rocks, snow, or waterfalls is a direct inspiration to me. I still can not figure out how I missed visiting these falls for all these years.
We all tend to forget that we are not the first one to discover a new location. In the early 1640’s, near this site, nine Dutch settlers were ambushed and killed by Indians. As a matter of fact, the word Moordener is Dutch for ‘murder’. The word Kill is Dutch for ‘body of water.’ The name Moordener Kill stuck and now describes a 16-mile long river that flows thru Rensselaer County and empties into the Hudson River.
If you are going to head over to make some images of the falls, you need to be aware of the dense, fast-moving, on a curve Highway 50 traffic. The additional problem is that the dams are front-lit at sunsets, so the traffic is very aggressive at 4-6pm, the same time you want to make your images. The solution is to head over on an early weekday evening. Parking is also limited.
Technical: Craft
At the point of capture, I also wanted to experiment with an HDR merge of three water patterns. For this image, I made a series of three bracketed images. The dynamic range of shooting directly into the front lit reflective water was tamed with the 6stop ND filter. Later in the digital darkroom, I brought these images into McPhun Aurora HDR 2017, then opened the composite HDR file into Photoshop.
After the HDR photo merge, the next step was to open up a patch layer to clean up the stick, stumps, to eliminate distractions. During the Artist Working (AW) phase of my workflow, I decided to flip the image as I thought it improved the visual flow of the image.
