Let’s Go Back in Time
Once upon a time, even I who know everything, had much to learn.
Below I have posted an image, one of the first mildly successful images of a waterfall.
This is a 5 second exposure at f/22. It isn’t great, but it gets that nice long formless water.
For a long time I thought the white cloud version of waterfall images was just how you did it and it was nice.
Here I am about 6 weeks later, and I am completely convinced that, in order to get a ‘good waterfall’ image, I need to have an exposure of 5-10 seconds. This one is 8. This trip was when I learned that you might not need 10 seconds. A lot of it depends on how much water is falling and how fast it is falling. An important thing to learn and adjust for.
By the end of this trip, I was starting to try to give definition to the water as it would fall.
2 seconds vs 0.4 seconds. Yosemite National Park.
After some Experience, My Images Improved
This is a 0.5 second exposure at f/16. You can see the move away from the ‘cloud-like water’ that I thought was ‘right’ when I started learning waterfalls. This is only a few months after the first image.
Let’s fast forward about 6 months and see a few images with exposures from about 1/4th seconds to 0.8 seconds. All images taken in Virginia in either Difficult Run State Park or Great Falls National Park.
In this, you can start to see how I like to take waterfall images today. I like to go one of two ways — either you instantly have the sense of place, or, there is no sense of place at all. These images are definitely towards the later, but it was also one of my early attempts at doing that.
Let’s Go a Few Years Forward
Around 2013 I both went on a big trip to Oregon and got a new job. These might not sound related but give me a minute.
This new job gave me a new coworker, who became a close friend. He hated the cloud-like waterfall, or boring white falls with no definition. This gave me some thoughts, and helped me to improve my images.
I actually like these images
This is quite the change in just under 3 years. Even if the one image has the ‘white lines’ waterfall, they show a change over the years, and there are fewer things where the intention is unclear.
I scanned through my images through early 2015 for examples, and I can see a trend starting.
By about 2017, I began to develop my style and preference. I generally like a bit of definition in the waterfall and really like the splash pool area. On occasion, I’ll do an abstract image of part way down the falls. I like it, when it works.
We’ll Stop Here
It took a lot of time and practice to get to my style of waterfall. I don’t know if it is unique to me or just a good ‘duh, that’s like what everyone does’. I also do a lot of editing on images which is not covered here yet.
Thank You For Reading
I hope you enjoyed this post and I appreciate your time.
I am trying different formatting blocks and it was a bit of a mess trying to get things to work, but I was trying.
-Brad