Feature: Capturing the Magic of a Waterfall

Summer is almost over, and many of us are grabbing some weekends in the great outdoors before the school year once again sends our kids back to the excitement of the Three R's. How many times have you hauled your digital camera along on a hiking or camping trip, hoping to photograph a waterfall the way you see it on the pages of National Geographic? For me, the answer is "all the time." This week, let's see how you can coax your digital camera into capturing a classic waterfall on one of your weekend adventures.

Slow It Down

Thankfully, there's nothing particularly difficult or mysterious about shooting a flowing waterfall. To capture a picture like that, do what I did: Just set the camera on a tripod, frame the shot, and then take the picture with the camera set to a slow shutter speed.

The easiest way to control your camera's shutter speed is via the Shutter Priority control, usually indicated by the letter S in your camera's settings. When set to Shutter Priority, you can raise or lower the shutter speed, and the camera automatically sets the aperture to the right size for you.

And indeed, shutter speed is key for this kind of picture. If you take the shot with the camera set to automatic, it'll try capturing the image with the fastest possible shutter speed--probably about 1/500 second. A fast shutter speed freezes the action, so you see a crisply defined flow of water with spray and bubbles caught in the act of dancing about the head of the fall. But freezing the action is rarely what you want with a waterfall. You want to slow the shutter speed, allowing the water to blur, which imparts the sense of motion in the flowing water that contributes to the charm of our sample shot.

How Slow Is Slow?

The good news is that you can get serviceable waterfall photos even without a tripod. That's because you can get a decent amount of motion blur from the water with a shutter speed of 1/30 or 1/15--and that's fast enough to steady by hand, if you brace yourself or have a very steady hand. It certainly helps to have something to steady yourself against like a tree or fence, but it isn't mandatory.

Of course, the slower you can set the shutter, the blurrier your water will become. So a picture taken at 1/2 second will look dreamier and more poetic than one taken at 1/30. Take an assortment at different shutter speeds; digital "film" is cheap.

Gaming the System

Sometimes, there's so much light available that you simply can't slow down the shutter far enough. If you're trying to shoot mid-day, for instance, your camera might refuse to let you set the shutter any slower than 1/30 second, because lower speeds would overexpose the picture. What to do?

One obvious solution is to come back later. If you can shoot near sunset, when the sun has gone behind hills or trees, you'll be able to shoot far more slowly because the camera needs more light to take pictures at that time of day.

If you insist on shooting mid-day, try changing the direction that you are shooting. Be sure the sun is behind the camera, not in front of it. Don't forget to check the camera's ISO setting. If it's set to a high value or to Automatic, manually set the ISO to the lowest number the camera supports. That makes the sensor less sensitive to light and possibly able to support a longer shutter speed.

You can also screw, snap, or tape a neutral density filter onto the front of your camera. Neutral density filters are sold at most camera shops. They block light from entering the camera without altering the color or tone of the light. They make the scene darker, allowing a longer shutter speed. Since many digital cameras don't have screw threads for filters, you can buy an oversized filter and tape it onto the front of the camera.

And don't be afraid to overexpose your picture a little. If your camera warns that there's too much light, take the picture anyway. Often, you can overexpose a picture by one or perhaps even two stops and still get good results.

Practice at Home

Finally, we don't encounter cool-looking waterfalls every day. It pays to be prepared when we find one out in the real world. So do what I do: practice at home. You can simulate a waterfall in your own kitchen. Check out the pictures below, which I shot this very morning in my sink. The first one features my camera in automatic mode (the shutter speed was 1/650 second). I then set the shutter speed to 1/30 second and tried again. Notice the picturesque way that the water rolls off my dirty dishes:

• Fast shutter
• Slow shutter

Take a few of these sorts of images, and you'll be ready for a real waterfall.