Weekly commented photo # 27 - Cascading water in Valserine river

That's obviously the same place than on my previous weekly commented photo and that's also one of the 36 images i processed yesterday afternoon and that will be uploaded on my french stock website in the next days.

So this week, my comments won't be about this lovely place in Haut Jura Natural Park neither why and how i took this photo. I just want to say a few general words about photographying this kind of scenes.

On several photo sharing sites i've seen many popular images of waterfalls or running water whitout any details in the water. This kind of image can probably give the illusion to be a nice photograph when viewed rapidly on a screen but they certainly won't make beautiful prints.

If a photographer wants to show the water movement there are two things he has to think about :

• Shutter speed :
  A low shutter speed is perfect for the silky water effect but if it's too low it may kill the effect. I don't know any rule to estimate the right one, it depends of the water speed and quantity and also of how is the light on the water. Of course huge shutter speeds can be used to create other effects.

• Avoiding over exposure :
  Over exposing the water can destroy a waterfall photo more surely than any other mistake and that's a mistake easy to make with rivers running under the woods like this one. Such places are often relatively darks and the contrast between shadows under the trees and white parts on the water can easily exceed the dynamic range of a camera.
  Avoiding to over expose the water at shooting time is the most important thing but the photographer must also be careful when he processes his raw files. Such files often contain a large part of dark pixels and a small part of highlights corresponding to the water. Lightening the shadows is often needed to give a pleasant image but that must done without sacrifying the highlights.

My french Waterfalls, Rivers and Stream gallery starts to be popular and i'm often asked about how to photograph moving water. These words i choose to write here today are what i answer most of time.