Weekly commented photo #21 - Silky water in the Cheran river

Silky water in the Chéran river - Massif des Bauges natural park

The Chéran river is one of the main rivers of the Massif des Bauges natural park.
The river is crossed by a famous old and nice bridge : the Abîme bridge or Pont de l'Abîme in french. The bridge overhangs the Chéran canyon in a very impressive place.

I went there initially on sunday without any photographic gear, just to find a great point of view on the bridge over the canyon.
I didn't found any interesting place and decided to go down to river for a little more exploration.
The path to the river runs through a very beautiful forest which can be a very good photographic subject in itself.
When i arrived to the river, there were many fishermen on the place, doing what fishermen are supposed to do.
In that first place, the river is looking nice and it's certainly a good place for bathing or fishing but for a photographer it's not an exciting one.

So, i walked along the canyon until i was stopped by some high cliffs. Then, i climbed a little rock overhanging the river with a tiny platform on its top.
Under, the water was nicely accelerated between many rocks in the river bed.
I thought it could be a good place to start and decided to come back the next day with a camera.

On monday, i left home before 5 am, drove to the bridge and took the path to the river.
Crossing the forest in dawn light was an enchantment and i couldn't resist to a few shots.
After a little walk, i arrived to my platform and started to set up my tripod. It was not an easy thing because the platform was really small. After some time, i managed to find a correct place for the tripod legs but then, my feets could just stay on the more steep and slippy part of the rock.
I didn't felt very comfortable but it seemed i had no other choice. It was not comfortable but not too much dangerous. In fact, the worst thing was that the composition possibilities were a bit limited.

The light was still soft and low and i started by some few shots of the water running through the rocks. I also (and difficultly) took a more wider view of the valley.
After this first bunch of images, i reviewed them on the back screen of the camera and choose to scenes for making some long exposures with my Hoya ND 400 filter. The first is the one posted here and the second one is just the vertical version. For both, exposure time was a bit more than 200 seconds at iso 100. In such conditions, exposing to the right is very important and works finely : the raw files were really noise free.