New River Gorge from Grandview Main Overlook

Note: This post is one of a series about our visit to New River Gorge and Bridge in late October 2018. Unfortunately, there was not a lot of color in the trees then. For details of the New River National River and links to other posts, please see New River Gorge and Bridge (Overview).

Update: This image has been re-edited using Aurora HDR 2019, a new HDR software package. I purchased this software after seeing some of the images from our recent Sedona trip and I wanted to see how much difference it made in this Grandview HDR panorama. Both this new version and the original version are in the Additional Images gallery so you can see the difference.

This image is actually 15 separate photographs which have been merged using Lightroom software. It is a panorama created from five separate HDR images. Each of these HDR images was made from three individual photographs taken with different exposures. (For an explanation of these techniques, please see the Definitions page.)

We arrived at Grandview late enough that the morning mist had mostly dissipated, but there was still some hanging near the tops of the mountains.

Turkey Spur Overlook, also in the Grandview area, is located at the extreme left side of this image at the highest point above the river there. The North Overlook is between the Main Overlook and Turkey Spur Overlook but is not visible in this image.

I had attempted to take pictures from the Main Overlook at Grandview during our visit to take the Full Moon Over New River Gorge photographs. However, the late afternoon sunlight and harsh shadows were not suitable conditions for good photographs. It was partially cloudy on the day we were leaving, so the shadows weren’t a problem. (Please see New River Gorge and Bridge for an overview of the New River Gorge and links to other related posts.) The panorama made from the photos I took on our first day’s visit to the Main Overlook is in the Additional Images section below, as is one of a coal train traveling up the gorge. These two photos were taken just 22 minutes before the first pictures of the Full Moon Over New River Gorge.