Waterfall (Decew Falls, St. Catharines, Ontario)

[seannalexander]

Decew Falls:


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Camera: Canon EOS REBEL T1i
Exposure: 0.25 sec (1/4)
Aperture: f/16.0
Focal Length: 18 mm
Exposure: 0.00
ISO Speed: 200
Exposure Bias: -2/3 EV
Flash: Off, Did not fire

[ohfour]

The first thing that strikes me when I look at this is that it's actually not a bad shot. It's not perfect, but with a bit of work you could retake this and get something pretty neat.

My main issue is that the sky is blown out, and the foreground colors are quite dark. There are a few ways you could address that - one would be to see if there's a better time of day to take the shot, when the light in the foreground is really nice and the sky is not too bright. Another would be to take a couple of exposures, one with the foreground nicely exposed and the other with the sky nicely exposed, then combine them in Photoshop (or make a 'proper' HDR in Photomatix).

The light in the very top left corner is nice, so if you could get more of that into the foreground (by coming back at a different time of day) you might see a significant improvement :-) The advantage to using natural light is that when the light is right, it's very obvious. Your scene will look simply fantastic, and that isn't something an HDR can easily replicate.

You could also try tilting the camera down a bit to get slightly more of the river into the foreground. It might look better, it might not - you won't know unless you've tried :-p

[seannalexander]

Thanks for the indepth critic! Coming back at a differnt time sounds like a great idea, and next time it will be with a full frame camera so i will have a wider shot.

I think I will use a flash or two on a puffy cloud day--that should let the sky hang out a bit more