Capture the Magic of a Waterfall

Dave Johnson

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Feature: Capturing the Magic of a Waterfall

Summer is almost over, and many of us are grabbing some weekends in the great outdoors before the school year once again sends our kids back to the excitement of the Three R's. How many times have you hauled your digital camera along on a hiking or camping trip, hoping to photograph a waterfall the way you see it on the pages of National Geographic? For me, the answer is "all the time." This week, let's see how you can coax your digital camera into capturing a classic waterfall on one of your weekend adventures.

Slow It Down

Thankfully, there's nothing particularly difficult or mysterious about shooting a flowing waterfall. To capture a picture like that, do what I did: Just set the camera on a tripod, frame the shot, and then take the picture with the camera set to a slow shutter speed.

The easiest way to control your camera's shutter speed is via the Shutter Priority control, usually indicated by the letter S in your camera's settings. When set to Shutter Priority, you can raise or lower the shutter speed, and the camera automatically sets the aperture to the right size for you.

And indeed, shutter speed is key for this kind of picture. If you take the shot with the camera set to automatic, it'll try capturing the image with the fastest possible shutter speed--probably about 1/500 second. A fast shutter speed freezes the action, so you see a crisply defined flow of water with spray and bubbles caught in the act of dancing about the head of the fall. But freezing the action is rarely what you want with a waterfall. You want to slow the shutter speed, allowing the water to blur, which imparts the sense of motion in the flowing water that contributes to the charm of our sample shot.

How Slow Is Slow?

The good news is that you can get serviceable waterfall photos even without a tripod. That's because you can get a decent amount of motion blur from the water with a shutter speed of 1/30 or 1/15--and that's fast enough to steady by hand, if you brace yourself or have a very steady hand. It certainly helps to have something to steady yourself against like a tree or fence, but it isn't mandatory.

Of course, the slower you can set the shutter, the blurrier your water will become. So a picture taken at 1/2 second will look dreamier and more poetic than one taken at 1/30. Take an assortment at different shutter speeds; digital "film" is cheap.

Gaming the System

Sometimes, there's so much light available that you simply can't slow down the shutter far enough. If you're trying to shoot mid-day, for instance, your camera might refuse to let you set the shutter any slower than 1/30 second, because lower speeds would overexpose the picture. What to do?

One obvious solution is to come back later. If you can shoot near sunset, when the sun has gone behind hills or trees, you'll be able to shoot far more slowly because the camera needs more light to take pictures at that time of day.

If you insist on shooting mid-day, try changing the direction that you are shooting. Be sure the sun is behind the camera, not in front of it. Don't forget to check the camera's ISO setting. If it's set to a high value or to Automatic, manually set the ISO to the lowest number the camera supports. That makes the sensor less sensitive to light and possibly able to support a longer shutter speed.

You can also screw, snap, or tape a neutral density filter onto the front of your camera. Neutral density filters are sold at most camera shops. They block light from entering the camera without altering the color or tone of the light. They make the scene darker, allowing a longer shutter speed. Since many digital cameras don't have screw threads for filters, you can buy an oversized filter and tape it onto the front of the camera.

And don't be afraid to overexpose your picture a little. If your camera warns that there's too much light, take the picture anyway. Often, you can overexpose a picture by one or perhaps even two stops and still get good results.

Practice at Home

Finally, we don't encounter cool-looking waterfalls every day. It pays to be prepared when we find one out in the real world. So do what I do: practice at home. You can simulate a waterfall in your own kitchen. Check out the pictures below, which I shot this very morning in my sink. The first one features my camera in automatic mode (the shutter speed was 1/650 second). I then set the shutter speed to 1/30 second and tried again. Notice the picturesque way that the water rolls off my dirty dishes:

Take a few of these sorts of images, and you'll be ready for a real waterfall.

Dave's Favorites: Pocket DVD Studio Plays Your Movies on a PDA

In recent years, my trusty little PDA has become a practical way to show off my favorite digital pictures. I've sworn off wallet photos entirely, in fact. When someone says something foolish, like "Do you have any pictures of your kids?" I simply pull my Palm Tungsten T3 out of my pocket and offer them a veritable slide show of recent photos.

But what about video? Can we show home movies on our PDAs, too?

You bet. Modern Palm and Pocket PC devices are certainly speedy enough for video. But it's not always easy to get movies onto the PDA to begin with. That's why I like Pocket-DVD Studio, which comes in both Palm OS and Pocket PC versions. This $32 application can take DVDs--both commercial movies and videos you've burned onto DVD yourself--and transform them into files optimized for your favorite PDA. You can choose screen sizes from 160 by 160 for really old devices all the way up to 480 by 320 for the latest generation. And though you can fit a 3-hour movie on a 512MB Secure Digital card, the audio and video quality are quite adequate.

I've used Pocket-DVD Studio to make Palm-sized copies of personal videos to show off to friends when I travel, and I've also used it to transfer commercial DVDs to my Palm for lengthy plane flights. The Seattle-to-Chicago hop is far more fun when you have a few episodes of Fox's short-lived series The Tick on your PDA.

Download a free trial from PQDVD.com.

Q&A: A Better Way to Get Pictures Out of Word

Recently, you explained how to get a picture out of Microsoft Word, but there's another way that works quite well. Just save it as a Web page.

--Jerry Mayeroff, Chicago

You're right, Jerry: This method works amazingly well.

The next time someone e-mails you a Word document with pictures in it, you can extract full-quality versions of those images without having to resort to any tricky screen captures or exporting operations. Just create a new folder somewhere on your computer (the desktop works fine). Open the Word document and choose File, Save As from the menu. Choose to save the file as a Web page and select the folder you just created as the save location. After you save it, open the folder and you'll find two versions of all the pictures in the file--smaller document-sized images, and full-sized JPEGs.

Hot Pic of the Week

Get published, get famous! Each week, we select our favorite reader-submitted photo based on creativity, originality, and technique. Every month, the best of the weekly winners gets a prize valued at between $15 and $50.

Here's how to enter: Send us your photograph in JPEG format, at a resolution no higher than 640 by 480 pixels. Entries at higher resolutions will be immediately disqualified. If necessary, use an image editing program to reduce the file size of your image before e-mailing it to us. Include the title of your photo along with a short description and how you photographed it. Don't forget to send your name, e-mail address, and postal address. Before entering, please read the full description of the contest rules and regulations.

This Week's Hot Pic: "Weathered Door," by Sandy Kronberger, Carlton, Minnesota

About this week's Hot Pic, Sandy says: "This is a photo of a shed near our cabin in northern Minnesota. Since the outhouse is scheduled for remodeling this summer, I had to capture the fantastic weathering effects caused by years of weather extremes. You can't buy these effects in a bottle!"

Sandy has only had her digital camera for about a year but says she has already amassed over 5000 pictures--enough to force her to add a second hard disk to her PC. She captured this picture with a Sony DSC-S75 and enhanced the contrast slightly using Corel Photo Paint 10.