I went on a waterfall trip with the Ohio Valley Camera Club (OVCC) with Tina Karle photographing waterfalls on the North side of Dayton, Ohio. We had about 12 people come with us on a great overcast day and got a little bit of rain at the end of the day. It was a perfect day.
We visited West Milton Falls, La Mantra Falls, Sunderland Falls, Ludlow Falls, and Arens Falls. I had never seen any of these falls before and this trip it was a lot of fun. I could have spent a couple hours at each one but we were on a mission that day and only had about 30 minutes at each waterfall. These are only about 1.5 hours away from where I live so I can easily go back and I plan to. Some of these waterfalls were in the most unique places that I would have never looked.
Waterfalls are lot of fun to take pictures of and can be very difficult to capture. Light is the problem when shooting them because the water tends to blow out and just looks like a white blob. Overcast days are the best because the light is softer and you don’t get any big strong glares off the water. The exposures are still tricky no matter the weather because they are long exposures.
For this trip I used my Canon 5D mk II with a Canon 17-40mm f/4L lens fitted with a B&W MRC Kaeseman circular polarizer and Lee Filters Little Stopper or Big Stopper. With both mounted I can’t shoot at 17mm because the filter holder becomes visible. I can shoot at 17mm with only one of the filters mounted but for this trip I needed both the polarizer (CPL) and the neutral density (ND) filter. The CPL reduces the reflections off the water and leaves leaving richer colors. A tripod is also a necessity to keep the image sharp and to allow for the longer shutter speeds needed to get the flowing water look.
The image below is of West Milton Falls. For this image the Little Stopper was mounted with the CPL. The exposure time was 68 seconds for this image. I shot it at 22mm and f/11. The camera is mounted on my tripod right in the middle of the stream about 2 inches above the water.
Here is another image from West Milton Falls from a different angle. The setup was the same except for a 101 second exposure.
Here is an image of Ludlow Falls. I saw this steel I-beam under the water and using my CPL I was able to use it in the image. This waterfall had a much larger pool out front and the water was choppy so I used my Lee Big Stopper (10 stop ND) to extend the exposure to 129 seconds smoothing out the pool. This was a tough falls to capture due to the distance as well as the large bridge overhead that is fairly ugly. I went with B&W for this image because I wasn’t a fan of the water color.
I still have many images to sort through and edit so I will have a follow up post with more images soon. There are some other ones that I think will come out really good when I get around to editing them. Don’t hold your breath though because I am not the fastest when it comes to editing 🙂
Beautiful shots Steve, I really like the first two. They give me that relaxed feeling and definitely something I would hang on my wall. Nice work!