Top 4 Mistakes When Photographing Waterfalls
Waterfalls often make great subjects of photos, but it’s very easy to get a bad result if you’re not paying attention when you click the button. Here are the top 4 mistakes book a photographer near me photographers make, and the easy ways to improve your shots!
Mistake #1: Setting your camera to auto-select aperture and shutter speed
Metering is something that cameras generally do very well. They begin to fail, however, when you start to introduce very white or very black subjects in an image. The reason for this is because humans see in 16-stops, whereas cameras “see” no more than 5-stops. This means that images with high contrast are not correctly exposed when left to the camera’s automatic settings – if you have a lot of white in your subject of focus, the camera tends to make it grey in the final image, and correspondingly underexposes the rest of the image. Similarly, if you have a lot of black in your image, the camera tends to make the black turn out grey in the final image, thus overexposing the rest of the image.
Mistake #2: Photographing Waterfalls on a sunny day
Sunny days in the forest may be nice for close-up studies, but adding sun to a waterfall landscape is not a good idea – the range of light and dark is so extreme that your compositions will be washed out or hidden in blackness. The best time to head out for a waterfall shoot is on an overcast day, with or without rain.
Mistake #3: Shooting Waterfalls without a polarizing filter
In a nutshell, polarizing filters cut the glare. Wet surfaces tend to reflect the sky colour, so you’ll actually need the polarizing filter more for rainy days where the sky colour is grey than for sunny days. But we’ve already agreed you shouldn’t photography waterfalls on sunny days… Removing glare from an image allows you to see the colourful world underneath the glare, and no amount of Photoshopping after your shoot will fix it.