• 0
  • 0
Xander Cesari's picture

Photographing the waterfall that claimed my last camera - looking for CC

A few weekends ago I hiked up a stream bed to photograph a waterfall. A hard lesson was learned about correct gear, bags, and setup and my camera was dropped in the stream. After purchasing another camera and drying out my lens I needed to reclaim my honor and conquer the falls. Challenge completed!

Looking for some hard honest critique here. I had a shiny new 4 stop ND filter and may have overdone the long exposure. Struggled with compositions I liked since the stream limited my mobility. Edited mainly to bring out fun details in the water.

Exposures were at ISO 100 and:
2 seconds - f14
1.3 seconds - f11
1/5 of a second - f5.6
1.3 seconds - f11

Log in or register to post comments
3 Comments

Hi Xander - I've taken so many images of this kind, opening this page for a moment I felt I was looking through my own archive! Beautiful places to while away a few hours, aren't they?

Photographic challenges include glaring sun, limited vantage points, and things growing where you don't need them. The final part is making more than a record shot.

I think these are well composed, especially 2 & 3. The first is spoilt by the tree on the left, no doubt impossible to avoid, but not lending itself to helping the image, instead producing awkward shapes.

I like the long exposures; in fact 3 is too short for me. I know the smoothly flowing water is considered a cliche, but anything else rarely looks right to me (exception - cover shot of Leibovitz' "Pilgrimage", but I'm not Annie by a long shot!). I use 3, 6. & 10-stop filters and a polariser (partial polarisation only, usually).

To me, these images are hampered by the brown-&-white colour combo, which can look drab - little you can really do about that, but I think then bringing out some blue tones from skylight reflection in the water (assuming there are any there in the first place) can give a sense of cool & wetness, somehow. I append images of a camera jpeg & final RAW edit to show what I mean.

I'd clone out the graffiti, cheating or not.

Hey Chris,

Thanks a lot for all your feedback. You definitely listed all the challenges I faced out at the falls that day! Particularly the main falls in images 1 and 4 were very difficult to find a good composition with.

The color palette was mainly because we've had so much rain out here in California this winter that the water is very silty and muddy. I did play around with editing it to be cooler but decided to try to go with a warmer color tone. I found that when I cooled off the browns and oranges in the image it was left looking very desaturated. Perhaps B&W wouldn't be the worst thing to try.

It looks like the edit you posted has a good amount of dehaze as well? I found it worked wonders on water.

There are more falls around here and the water is still high so I'll be taking another run at this soon!

Hi again, Xander. I hadn't heard of dehaze, nor have it available when I edited that image.

My near-universal starting point for "post" is to lighten the shadows, and then apply an S-shaped curve. This increases midrange contrast, giving a sense of luminosity, and increasing saturation, which is when the blues in this image become apparent. The water at this waterfall is always brownish too, because of vegetation upstream.

Enjoy your next outing there!