Rivers/ Waterfalls - too much white

[ShankarB]

Hi, I recently shot a few pictures of gushing rivers and waterfalls. The pictures turned out to be a bit disappointing - the shapes, the finer details of crashing waves, water bursts and flowing water were all rendered glaringly white.

The finer details are not visible - I was expecting finer details such as splashing water droplets etc to be captured. While the surrounding landscapes such as trees and rocks appear in great colour and detail, the water appear just a mass of white. I'm not quite sure why - it was a brilliant light with more than adequate sunlight (it was midnoon) and I had mistakenly set the ISO to a high value of 800.

I want to know if it is possible to recover (make visible) these finer details from this photos. I used a Canon S3 camera.

[OsmosisStudios]

Examples are pretty much necessary in this case, along with the EXIF.

If you had the ISO set to 800 youre likely overexposing, which means you'll be clipping highlights and getting blur. So you wont get anything that moves as sharp and you'll get hot spots. But it's best to see.

[wildbird]

Try shooting early or late, lower ISO, close the aperture down (large number) and it should help. Experiment a bit to see how slow you can go to get the motion, plus of course use a tripod to keep it steady

[Andrew Briggs]

If you were shooting raw then you may be able to get a bit of detail back, but it's never going to look as good as when the exposure is right in the first place.

One way to check this while you're out in the field is to check the histogram after you've taken a picture. This will show you if the highlights were clipped, in which case you can manually adjust the exposure, and try again. Keep on adjusting until you get the perfect exposure for your shot.

Edit: Here's some info on how to use the histogram:
Understanding Histograms