Photographing Waterfalls

Taking pictures of waterfalls is a lot like taking pictures of fireworks: You need a tripod and a long exposure to capture the movement. But, unlike fireworks, you’ll be capturing these images in the daylight which means controlling the exposure is a lot more difficult.

Why? Because at night, you can simply open the shutter and let the fireworks streak across the sky and “paint” the image onto your film or CCD chip. There is very little concern about other light sources messing with your exposure.  You do essentially the same thing with a waterfall – letting the streaming water “paint” itself onto the image – but with so much available light bouncing around, it becomes difficult to get the exposure correct.

So you need to know several things:

1) Go with the lowest ISO setting possible – 50 or 100 ISO is fine.
2) Select a high f-stop number – f8 or higher – in order to make the slower shutter speeds available.
2) Try to pick overcast or cloudy days, which will also cut down on the available sunlight. If it’s a bright sunny day outside, try to wait until dusk to capture your images.
3) You’ll want your shutter speed to be at least one second or longer to capture the water movement. Using a fast shutter speed just freezes the water movement and looks unnatural.
4) If you’re planning a long hike to get to the waterfall, plan on using a lightweight tripod, it’ll ease the strain on your back.

Once you’ve lined up your waterfall, experiment with different shutter speeds. Placing your camera on shutter priority will help a lot here since you can select the shutter speed and the camera will select the correct f-stop. Take one picture at one second, one at one-and-a-half seconds, one at two seconds, until the image looks good.

You’ll need to be careful about blowing out the highlights and losing detail in the white areas of the flowing water so that’s why you’ll take lots of pictures at different shutter speeds. You can then select the best ones once you get back to your computer.