Copyright Nathan Montgomery, 2008
Copyright Nathan Montgomery, 2008I took these pictures from our campsite in the Himalayan village of Sissu. The stunning waterfall was situated just across a roaring mountain river from our campground. I woke each morning and took pictures of the waterfall, and around 6:30 each day, the sun would hit the mist and form a rainbow.
It's hard to get a sense of scale in a picture like this, but I'd estimate the waterfall as a 200-foot sheer drop. We hiked to the base of it our first evening in camp.
4 comments:
Did you take these shots without a tripod?
While I can't remember for sure, I think these probably were taken with the tripod. Once we left Sissu, I never unpacked my tripod again for the rest of the trip, but each of the four mornings we were there, I went out to take pictures, and at least on a few of those days, I took the tripod with me.
It reminds me of a green Grand Canyon...I guess only in the way we can not see the river at the bottom of the shot...any recollection of the fstop or exposure times on the water fall shot?
Could you compare this shot's techincallities to the Oregon water fall shots (ie. f/stop, exposure time, filtering, time of day...)
There are a lot of differences between this shot and the Oregon water fall shots. Most notably, I'm using a different camera, with far greater aperture limitations. For the waterfalls images in Oregon, I typically started with the aperture set to F14. On my Kodak, the smallest aperture option is F8, which is what I used here. So obviously, right there, you know that I took this picture at a faster shutter speed.
On top of that, the lighting is completely different. In Oregon, we were buried in the woods and below overcast skies. Here, even though it's 6:30 in the morning, we've got a lot of light, and again, that's going to make the shutter speed faster. How much faster? Well, for this picture, my shutter speed was 1/320 sec. By comparison, my Multnomah Falls shot (also a waterfall with some serious volume) had a shutter speed of 1/4 sec. In other words, between the aperture difference and the light, we're talking about 6 1/2 stops difference in shutter speed!!!
The net result is that you capture the water in motion rather than getting the smooth effect that I got in Oregon. In general, my strong preference is for the small aperture/long exposure/smooth water approach. However, even with a different camera, I don't think I could've done that here. The water was just coming over the falls too fast. When a water is already white in realtime, long exposures tend to not to work as well.
I did use my circular polarizer for this shot (which is probably worth a stop on the aperture). Generally speaking, I'd like to use a polarizer anytime I've got green or water in the picture, but on this camera, using the polarizer is a little cumbersome, so sometimes I go without even when there's good reason to be using it.
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