Oregon Cascades Travelog #7Bend, OR - Wed, 2 Jul 2025, 10:30amWe
got a bit of a late start leaving our hotel room in Bend today. As a result we put off a hike in the desert-y terrain west of here because we'd want to start early to beat the heat until later in the week. Instead we came here, to the Oregon Cascades where there's shade on most trails, and hoped we weren't starting too late for the popular Tumalo Falls trail. We weren't; we arrived in good time. And it would be the first of at least
six (depending on how you count them) waterfalls we'd see today.
Fair warning: In this blog I'm going to talk tech(nique) about photography. If that makes your eyes glaze over, you're more than welcome to employ the
Playboy magazine approach of just looking at the pictures and not reading the article. 🤣

If waterfalls were scored on a scale of views divided by distance or effort to get to them, Tumalo Falls would score very highly. The first viewpoint, where I make the photo above, is just steps from the trailhead. There's also an upper viewpoint that you can see above the falls to the left in the pic above. I'll get back to that in a moment.
On this trip I carried two cameras, as I often do— though less now than before. The two cameras are 1) my cell phone's built-in camera, which I virtually always have with me, and 2) my Fujifilm interchangeable lens camera that I opt to carry with me when I think the views are going to be really great... or require one of the things that camera, and the special lenses I own, are really good for. I'm selective about bringing the latter camera because it's comparatively heavy and bulky.
So, what's this heavy, bulky (comparatively) camera really good for? Let's start with the same basic picture:

One thing you can see straight away by comparing these first two photos is that, in good light, the Fuji captures way richer colors than my iPhone. "Oh, but can't you punch up the colors in Photoshop?" you might ask. I already did! The first picture is the result after fiddling a bit with saturation and contrast. The Fuji kicks the iPhone's iAss when there's good light.
BTW, why do I specify "good light"? Take look at the deep shadow to the right of the falls. The iPhone pulls out more detail in the shadow. Again, yes, I can try to fix that in Photoshop, and again, yes
I've already done that in the Fuji's picture. The difference is that modern iPhone are actually doing exposure stacking, automatically combining multiple images capture immediate after each other at different exposure values to show more detail in areas of deep shadow. Doing this with a conventional camera involves a technique called HDR— high dynamic range— that requires some manual steps in addition to special software. The iPhone just does it automatically and gives you the result without you even having to think about it.
Okay, so rich colors in good light are nice, but what else can the heavy, bulky camera do? Well, I like to bring it whenever I know I'll be seeing waterfalls, because it can capture motion-blurred water.

Here's a photo from the same vantage point again but with the camera set to make an exposure lasting 0.25 sec. Relative to that speed the water is moving very fast, so it blurs into an appearance like silk sheets, while the trees' leaves move only slightly and the rocks move not at all.
Achieving this blur effect requires a few pieces of equipment and a degree of control over the camera. The key piece of equipment is a neutral density (ND) filter, a lens attachment that blocks out most of the light. This allows the camera to be set with a very slow shutter speed and not capture an image that's all washed-out white from so much light hitting the sensor. Remember, photography is the art and science of captured light. Capture too little, the picture's all black. Capture too much, the picture's all white. I'm using an ND filter that blocks 98.5% of the light. (Why 98.5%? That's an approximation. It's actually passing through 1/64, or 1/2
6, of the light. This is called a 6 stop ND filter. Every "stop" is a factor of 1/2.)
While this extra gear is fun to use effectively it's also a minor nuisance to use. Or, more specifically, switching in and out of the gear is a nuisance. The filters screw on and off the front of my lenses, and I have a little pouch to keep them in when they're not screwed on a lens. Going back and forth between "filter is screwed on" and "filter is off, and stowed" is time consuming. And on the trail it's also a bit dangerous. What if I drop a filter? The big ones aren't cheap. And when they get dirty I have to clean them— which
while hiking is also a nuisance.
Thus I decided after doing the screw-it-on/screw-it-off thing at the viewpoint near the trailhead I would just leave the ND filters on the lenses on my Fujifilm camera. I'd use my iPhone for standard snaps and my Fuji for the specialized blur shots. BTW, that's how pro photographers roll. When you see them juggling multiple cameras at an event, it's because the camera are set up to do different things really well, and it's easier to swap cameras between shots than to reconfigure the gear. So, for the rest of the hike I rolled like a pro. 😅