Weekly commented photo # 29 - Saut Girard in Herisson waterfalls

Saut Girard in Hérisson waterfalls


Hérisson river runs in Jura mountains and offers one of the most famous range of waterfalls in France.

If you look for an english translation of the word Hérisson you will find things like Hedgehog or Urchin but the name of the river doesn't come from this pretty animal. It comes from Yrisson which means sacred waters in old jura language.

I wanted to visit this area for a long time but i never took any time for that when i was living in Provence. Now i'm closer and it's easier.
I went there for a few family holidays at the end of the past week. It was not intended to be a photography trip but decently i couldn't go there without a camera.

From top to bottom of the river, there are seven main waterfalls :

• Saut Girard
• Moulin Jeunet
• Saut de la Forge
• Château Garnier
• Gour Bleu
• Grand Saut
• Eventail

The river runs mostly in the forest and autumn is probably the best season for beautiful photography. In summer beautiful lights are really shorts in time and i didn't want to spend most of my days running from top to bottom, looking for nice point of views and trying to guess when the light would be at its best on each waterfall.
So, before leaving home i did some internet searches and decided to work in two places :

• Saut Girard, because the access is easy.
• Gour Bleu, because it's really in the forest and i love that.

We arrived on Thursday evening and it was easy to find a place for our van not too far from Saut Girard.

The sky was really cloudy and i started to try different compositions on one side of the waterfall. Suddenly, the clouds left some place for the late evening sun and all the area wath painted with this beautiful golden light.
I mounted my Sigma 10-20 on my camera and ran with my tripod to the middle of the little lake. It's probably the best place to show the waterfall and its neighborhood but it's impossible to find an interesting foreground. That's why the photo is cropped to 16x9 aspect ratio.

The contrast was huge between the sky, the bright rocks and the shadows under the trees. After a few tries, i decided to go for an HDR work and the photo posted here was done from 4 exposures processed with Picturenaut and Silkypix.