Lessons learned at a waterfall

Waterfall. North Fork, Snake River, Colorado, 2013

After photographing an interesting high country waterfall this past weekend I reflected on a few miscellaneous lessons learned…or more accurately, RE-learned.

Said lessons:

–Keep a road atlas and your camera in the car. You never know when you’ll get a few minutes or even a few hours to explore something new. This waterfall on the North Fork of the Snake River, just west of A Basin ski area, was marked on my Colorado road atlas and was just off the main road–and I had some spare time. There was no trail to it, but it only required a few minutes of steep, messy-mossy, scrambling to find it.

–I like to photograph waterfalls like this when the light is soft or the scene is somewhat shaded so as to avoid extreme contrasts in the water and on the rock. An overcast day is ideal. The low light also helps to slow down the shutter speed, although you can certainly use a neutral density filter. On this particular day–bright and sunny with popcorn cumulus floating about, I had to wait until a cloud wandered across the face of the sun to get the lower contrast I wanted…and, naturally, once I was set up on the tripod the clouds seemed to sense my anticipation and they immediately started avoiding the area (Murphy’s Law).

–To find a good perspective, I had to commit to a scary jump across the the frothy creek below the falls, then do some scrambling up through thick tree limbs and steep terrain on the opposite bank. My tripod stance was precarious and I kept my camera strap firmly wrapped around my wrist to avoid having everything plummet tragically into the rocky water below. When one does such things to capture an image, there is an inclination to think the image so captured must be good since it was so difficult to get! Not always so–the viewer has no idea what it cost you to get it. Objectively speaking, the above image is just an average water shot.

–Don’t forget that waterfalls put off a lot of mist. I initially tried the obvious base o’ the falls shot with the wet rocks in the foreground but the mist was way too heavy and my lens kept getting splattered. Keep your camera covered and pointed away until the moment of capture to minimize the problem…then check your lens between each shot to ensure there are no droplets on it (much easier to fix in the field rather than with the clone tool). If you are a no filter kind of person, this may be a situation in which a protective filter would be nice–especially if you are shooting salt water scenes. Use a shower cap over your camera while it is on the tripod to keep the mist off of it.

–Experiment with different shutter speeds. Cover the range from very slow (1-2 seconds, if lighting or filters permit) up to, say, 1/30th of a second. 1/500 or more to freeze the movement. Slower speeds give you the milky effect, but you can lose detail and blow out highlights. Faster shutter speeds will give you more detail in the water but may not show the water as smooth as you like. It seems like 1/2 to 1/15 of a second range is nice for the smooth effect, depending on the speed of the water and your distance from it.

–Try both landscape and portrait (horizontal and vertical) orientations with your camera.

–Try shooting the entire waterfall in the classic manner with foreground, middle, and background, then try searching out the “picture within the picture” with a longer focal length (as in the image above).