opinions most welcome..

[chalkie7]

Hello all,

I'm new to this site and to digital photography. I read with interest some very good advise on here on taking shots of moving water / waterfalls and thought I'd give it a go. Anyway, please see the attached file and let me have your comments please. The reason I ask is that whilst I'm reasonably happy with how the water has been captured, I feel that the overall picture isn't that good. I used a Canon 400d with a Sigma 28-70mm lens, polarising filter, tripod, no flash, iso 100, tv setting on the camera set at 1/5. Sorry if all the above is a bit jumbled!

Regards,

Mark

[jiminyClickit]

chalkie7, Welcome

Hard to say without being there, but the top of the falls seems too closely cropped. Appears to be an overcast day, so colors are a little muted. It's a pretty good shot overall, though the falls might become more important if you cropped some right side and bottom, perhaps an eighth of each measure, and try some contrast and/or saturation.

[wulf]

The water coming over the falls looks great. However, the whole image doesn't quite come together for me. I think the two biggest blockages are:

1. Nothing is quite sharp. The water is obviously blurred by its own movement but I would expect the rocks to be more in focus (what aperture did the camera choose to balance your ISO and shutter speed settings?)

2. A substantial part of the frame is taken up with the foreground rocks which are not only soft but also very dark, so there is not much of interest there.

If the site is near you, definitely go back again. If I could visit, I would definitely want to explore some shots that just focus on the top of the waterfall (avoiding the problem of how to also effectively include the rocks) and how the water steps down over several levels, forming a strong pattern.

Wulf

ps. My other opinion is that a title like "First attempt at waterfall and rocks" would have been more descriptive than "opinions most welcome"! The latter is taken for granted by posting in this forum

[chalkie7]

thanks for the replies guys...really appreciated.

Wulf - I couldn't agree more with your first comment. I took many shots and this is one of the better ones, however, none of them have a particularly sharp feel to them. As for the aperture setting, I'm afraid I'm not sure. I will definitely be re-visiting the location again soon to try again...will try and take more notice of all settings. I'll also try and be a little more descriptive in my titles in the future too...good point!

Thanks again,

Mark

[jdepould]

This is one of those situations where shooting manual is pretty important. I wouldn't go any larger than f/8, preferably f/11 or 16. Any higher than that and you run into distortion issues, and it's really unnecessary with the CP.

[wulf]

I've taken a look at the properties of the photo (with a Firefox plugin that lets me see the embedded EXIF data). F/10 is what the camera picked.

jdepould - what kind of distortion do you mean?

Wulf

[chalkie7]

Thinking about it, I'm pretty sure I did forget to change the setting on the lens from auto to manual...got that carried away trying to get all the other settings right. Can't wait to go back again now to have another stab.

[jdepould]

Originally Posted by wulf

I've taken a look at the properties of the photo (with a Firefox plugin that lets me see the embedded EXIF data). F/10 is what the camera picked.

jdepould - what kind of distortion do you mean?

Wulf

This came up in another thread, addressed here

As far as the f/10, that's odd because it doesn't look like f/10, seems to shallow.

[wulf]

Originally Posted by jdepould

This came up in another thread, addressed here

As far as the f/10, that's odd because it doesn't look like f/10, seems to shallow.

Isn't the gist of that - I read the article and skimmed the discussion - that you get more defraction as the aperture narrows, leading to increased softness?

Decreasing the hole size (thus increasing the f/number to f/11, f/16 or smaller) would potentially increase the softness effect if that is to blame although it would increase the available depth of field.

Since I can't see anything particularly sharp here I wonder if there was either a little bit of movement from the button press / shutter release action or if the autofocus got it wrong because it tried to take a reading from part of the waterfall, which is blurred because of the water's motion?

It is definitely the kind of shot where I would want to be using full manual mode and experimenting with a range of options.

Wulf