• Richard L. Evans.

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In my early twenty’s, I moved to Boston to pursue my master’s degree. Along with the intensive semester load and my TA, I had very little spare time. I didn’t think about photography until I started my first job. I was living close to New Hampshire, and there was a waterfall a few steps away from my apartment. Now armed with my past experiences, I thought I was ready. I hiked up to the waterfall and composed a shot on my brand new D5000. The result was a shaky mess of a photo and left me even more confused.

I spend quite a bit of time to resolve the issues I faced. My gorilla pod was not sturdy enough, so I had to be very careful with how I activated the shutter. I managed to overcome that with the self-timer functionality. I used a small aperture of f18 to compensate for my 2-second exposure and finally got an image that looked good on the camera LCD. I rushed back home and started post-processing. The photo didn’t look as good on the bigger screen highlights were blown where light shafts peeked through the foliage, and the diffraction at f18 made the image very soft. It took me a while to understand why it was happening, but I kept on returning to the waterfall to perfect my technique.

Finally, after several tries, I managed to get a recipe for a successful waterfall shot. The ideal shutter speed is between 1-4 seconds and aperture between 5.6 to 11. I use the lowest iso available on the camera and an ND filter if necessary. A 2-stop ND Grad 150x100 filter is one of the most useful accessories that you can add to your camera gear. It took me way more time to make a good composition of a waterfall, though, but that’s a subject for whole another post.

Below in comments are the links to my other attempts at the same place.