Multnomah Falls had long been on my list of must-photograph locations for one of my gigapixel wall mural photos. We specifically planned our Fall 2025 RV tour of the Pacific Northwest to pass by this location. The weekend we arrived, rain was predicted for all three days I had scheduled to be in the area. On Sunday afternoon, the weather forecast called for a break in the rain, so my wife and I loaded up the Jeep and headed out to the falls. Of course, being a weekend, there were tons of people and no parking spaces. Thankfully, we finally saw a parking spot open up in a paid lot. I quickly grabbed the spot and headed up to the falls. When we arrived, we had dead calm winds and bright overcast skies, which can really bring out colors.
I set up my Nodal Ninja M2 and got the camera mounted. Wanting to attempt to shoot the world’s largest image ever made of the falls, I chose a focal length of 300mm. This naturally required that I shoot in focus-bracketed mode for virtually the entire scene. I spot-metered the light in the brightest area and set my exposure for this area to +2⅓ stops using the Expose to the Right methodology. Starting at the upper left, I began shooting, praying that it didn’t start raining. Of course, with all the people in the area, when I got to the bridge portion of the scene, there were lots of people standing on it. I had to stop shooting and wait, and wait, and wait until that section of the bridge was clear. Then I moved to the next position and waited some more. After about 20 minutes, I was able to shoot the bridge area with no people in my shots. All told, it took me the better part of an hour to cover the entire scene.
This panorama consists of 540 individual 45-megapixel focus-stacked images derived from 8,050 focus-bracketed images. The entire set of images was preprocessed using Adobe Camera Raw to balance the exposure between the brightest and darkest areas of the scene. These were exported as TIFF files. I then used Helicon Focus Pro Version 8 to perform the focus stacking. Once the focus stacking was complete, I used PTGui Pro Version 13.3 to do the stitching. Lastly, final post-processing was done in Photoshop.
It turned out to be the second-largest, highest-resolution photo in my entire portfolio. The finished image is 11.4 gigapixels—101,769 x 112,079 pixels; 329″ x 373″ (27 ft. 5 in. x 31 ft. 1 in.); 300 PPI (8.36 m x 9.47 m) original image size. Quite likely the world’s largest photo ever shot of Multnomah Falls.
