How to Shoot a Waterfall?

People love waterfalls. I can still remember watching Bob Ross paint a waterfall, and thinking to myself, "I can do that". I guess that was the point of The Joy Of Painting, but it turns out that I can't do it. Paint is clearly not my forte. But still, there was something magical about watching moving water come to life, and about trying to capture a still image of something so inherently about movement.

Enter the camera. When I heard there was a waterfall near our campsite, I knew I had to go try and take some pictures. Waterfalls are, of course, moving water. This introduces an interesting, but important choice. A waterfall can't be captured in the same way you would a regular landscape picture. Since the water is moving, shutter speed becomes an important factor. A fast shutter speed will freeze individual droplets of water, a slow shutter speed will blur the water. The end result is markedly different.

I captured two pictures which helped me explore this difference. I wish I'd increased the shutter speed for the one photo more. 1/500 wasn't fast enough to really freeze the water. The light wasn't great, and I should have switched to a 35mm 1.8 lens to give me some more options. Oh well. Live and learn.

 f/4
1/500
55mm

f/16

1/20

55mm

Fun in the Shadows

Not enough time to play...

We took the girls camping the other weekend. It was a good opportunity to experiment with some different lighting situations.

The campground was surrounded by mossy ground and logs. Thankfully, since BC campgrounds stopped letting people drag and cut up logs for firewood, there's some interesting things to be found. I started just with getting a picture of the ground. Some of the best pictures I've seen just use fun falling through different objects to create interesting patterns of light and dark, and this looked like a good chance to give it a try.

f/5
1/400
70mm

More posts coming to explore some more macro and water pictures.