After leaving Emerald Lake, Stephanie and I headed to Takakkaw Falls, officially Canada's highest unbroken waterfall (Vancouver Island's Della Falls is higher overall, but it's largest drop is broken by a rock ledge). The lower portion of Takakkaw Falls drops an impressive 830 vertical feet, producing a spray that will obscure camera lenses 200 yards away.
My understanding from photography classes and books is that protocol for American photographers is to use long exposures at waterfalls to produce silky, blended images. Unfortunately, to get that kind of an exposure without bleaching out your image, you need to use a very small aperture opening. The day we visited Takakkaw was bright enough that my long exposure images bleached out, even with my highest f-stop. In the future, I hope to artificially increase my aperture options with a neutral density filter. For now, I'm taking solace that, unlike the preferred U.S. convention, apparently Japanese photographers prefer crisper waterfall images. Consequently, we'll just pretend that this picture was intended to as a tribute to British Columbia's large Japanese immigrant population.
I also used my tripod and the delay feature on my camera to take a similar image with Stephanie and I in it.
4 comments:
Why are you guys wearing jackets on the other shot? I mean, it's summer! Oh wait, you were in Canada.
Well actually, in that case it had nothing to do with the temperature. The mist off of the waterfall was intense, and we were just trying to stay relatively dry. After that shot was taken, we hiked to withing 50 meters or so of the fall, and it was in some ways similar to being outside in a North Carolina tropical storm.
Did you intend to make the shot look like the waterfall was dumping onto your heads? I think it looks like something I would do. At my wedding, when the photographer was taking "funny shots", I had my three groomsmen group around a tree with me and when we turned to look at the photographer it looked like we were all peeing on the tree in our tuxedos. I'll have to find that picture.
Nah... it just turned out that way.
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