People often ask me “how do you capture the water like that?” Perhaps you too have seen waterfall photos with the water flowing like a silky dream, and wondered how the photographer got that look. This post will focus on waterfalls photography, including my tried and true techniques for capturing photos of both serene silky cascades and powerful torrents.
Shoot from a tripod
No matter how steady your hand, and how good your camera or lens claims to be at Image Stabilization (IS*), the longest you can possibly expect to hand hold your camera without obvious shake and blur is 1/15th to 1/8th of a second, and probably less. Since moving water in waterfalls requires anywhere from 1/10th of a second up to several seconds to get that silky water effect, you simply must use a tripod (or a flat rock) to steady your camera for those long exposures necessary for waterfalls photography. And since you are shooting on a tripod, make sure to also eliminate camera shake from itchy shutter fingers by using a remote shutter release or internal camera timer, and live view or mirror lockup to remove shutter shudder.
*(VR) Vibration Reduction for you Nikon shooters, (OS) Optical Stabilization for Sigma lenses
Shoot in Manual or Shutter Priority Mode
Digital cameras are smart, but they won’t intuitively know that you want to shoot a long exposure unless you tell it to. Plus, in fully automatic mode, some cameras know you can’t hand-hold a long exposure, so they often won’t even allow you shoot a long exposure unless you are in Aperture Priority (Av), Shutter Priority (Tv) or fully Manual (M) mode. Every camera is different, obviously, so get out your camera manual and play around a bit to get the hang of the different modes. It really is worth spending some time, as moving from Automatic or Program mode to manual is the biggest hill to climb to get from novice to photographer. Going completely manual requires you to read your camera’s light meter to get the appropriate exposure, but using shutter or aperture priority does that work for you.
Keep in mind that for digital cameras there are 3 different variables that each affect the other: Shutter speed, aperture & ISO. For now, shutter priority is a good choice for waterfall photography because the shutter speed makes a huge difference in the look of the final image. If you want to ‘slow down’ the water to make it silky, drop the ISO as low as you can, which in shutter priority mode will make the aperture smaller (the f-stop will increase), giving the photo greater depth of field.
Sidebar: There are lots of advantages to shooting longer exposures: Long exposures => smaller aperture => greater depth of field + lower ISO => less noise/grain + silky water
Experiment with shutter speed
Now that we’ve mastered how to get cool, silky shots, let’s mix things up, shall we? As we’ve already discussed, the shutter speed can make a huge difference in the look of you image, even if the exposure is exactly the same. Sometimes, especially when the subject is a large waterfall, with a lot of water, I play with shorter exposures to capture the power of a strong falls. Let’s take a closer look at several images of the same falls, taken in succession on the same rainy morning.
Notice in the detail of the first image, which was taken at 1/200th of a second shutter speed. See how the flow of water, which in real-time looks like a continuous stream of water, is in reality a collection of individual water drops. Fascinating, right? At longer shutter speeds, generally at least 1/10th of a second, these drops blend together, giving the illusion of silky, continuous water. I find that my favorite silky waterfalls shots are usually between 1/2 sec and 2 seconds long, and to capture the majesty and power of a big waterfall in full flood, perhaps 1/100 to 1/250 sec.
I make a point, after I have captured the image of a falls that I really like, to switch things up and shoot 2 or 3 shots with a much faster (or slower) shutter speed, to see what comes of it. Using RAW files, you can always adjust color temperature and exposure after the fact, but there is no magic button in Lightroom or Photoshop to separate out the individual droplets of water (or blur them together), so make sure you capture some variations in the field to give you more options. It all comes down to individual preference. Take the two images of Havasu Falls below, for instance. They have almost identical exposures and composition by keeping the F-Stop high(aperture small), and inversely adjusting the ISO and shutter speeds. I have sold large prints of both, because the buyers had very different (and personal) reactions to the two images. The higher shutter speed may feel more real to one viewer, but some folks really prefer the silkiness of the slower shutter speed.
Shoot on a cloudy or rainy day, if possible
This one may seem counter-intuitive. As you can see from the images so far, water coming over a falls gets churned up, and creates highlights that often are much brighter than the surrounding dark wet rocks or leaves – in rafting it’s called whitewater for a reason. If there is sun directly on the falls, the highlights will jump off the right side of your histogram, or if you compensate the exposure for the brightly lit white water highlights, you will lose details in the shadows.
If the day is sunny, or party sunny, then try to time your arrival at a waterfall for when the falls are in shade, with little or no direct sunlight on the highlights. Bounce light can help fill in the shadows the same way a bright overcast day will, and you will still have less contrast. If you are shooting in shutter priority, you may find that you need to use exposure compensation by 1/3rd to a full stop to expose for the shadows, or use Auto Exposure bracketing to insure the right exposure, especially under shifting lighting conditions (think partly cloudy with fast-moving clouds). My default bracketing is three images: 0 and ± 2/3rds of a stop, unless I think the contrast is so high that HDR is necessary.
HDR can be very difficult when shooting waterfalls. Moving objects give HDR software trouble, and when the water changes shape, and/or leaves on nearby trees or flowers move during long exposures, the results can be disappointing.
Use a Circular Polarizer Filter
Like many nature photographers, a circular polarizer is usually on the end of my lens.
A circular polarizer filter is incredibly useful in and around waterfalls: to take the glare off of wet rocks, dial-up reflections in a pool, or reverse that to reveal the rocks below. When shooting up at a falls from below, it can make blue skies bluer, or give cloudy skies more contrast. It has the pleasant side effect of dropping the amount of light that reaches your lens by a stop or two, making longer exposures, and/or smaller apertures, possible. Sometimes I add an ND filter to the mix if I need to ’slow down’ the water even more.
Using Water as a Composition Element
The usual rules of composition apply: ‘If you see something pretty, throw something in front of it.’
Often the best way to show water movement is to have a solid foreground or mid-ground object (like boulder or log) that stays solid as the water flows around it. With a large falls, try zooming in enough to have water entering and leaving the frame, which can give a lovely sense of capturing a moment in time and space, for a creek that starts far upstream and continues beyond. Many waterfalls are not just one fall. Try shooting from below, and using a smaller cascade as a foreground for the main event. In the above photo on Upper Buttermilk Creek in Ithaca, NY, I noticed the lovely tree reflection in the puddle, and set up my tripod very close to it, using a very wide-angle lens (Canon 7D with an EF-S 10-22mm) to capture the stillness of the pool along with the curving sweep of the falls. A circular polarizer brought out the reflection.
Try Black and White
Waterfalls can make excellent black and white images. There is something timeless about waterfalls photography that works well in a medium that was mastered at the end of the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries. It is also a way to solve a problem: waterfalls are generally at their most dramatic in April or May, when Spring rains combine with snow melt to give waterfalls their biggest flow, but when buds are just starting to appear on trees, and flowers are not yet present to add that pop of color. As you can see, they work for winter waterfall shots as well. A future blog will touch on my favorite technique converting color digital images into black and white masterpieces.
Sometimes you get Rainbows
Most people who visit Yellowstone National Park use apps to try to predict when geysers will erupt, but if the sun is out, rainbows at Lower Falls in the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone are even more predictable! Rainbows in waterfalls are generally only formed when there is alot of mist and spray kicked up by a powerful falls, with the angle of light just so (mid morning in July, depending on which viewpoint you shoot from). While a few of the highlights in the water are a bit blown out, this sunny photo worked out because the cliff rocks are also brightly lit (and a lighter, yellow stone). Here the exception proves the rule. I used my trusty circular polarizer to maximize the color intensity in the rainbow.
Conclusion
Thanks for reading my first blog post! The plan is to drop one of these each week. Future blogs will be a mixture of instructional blogs like this one, details of my hiking adventures to some fantastic places, and the day-to-day realities of my photography business.
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