Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Photographing Waterfalls with the Nikon D90!

Waterfall photography is one of the things i like to do any chance i get!
This last weekend i woke up to a nasty rainy day and did not want to spend my day off setting around the house. I googled waterfalls in my area and found this place only 30 minutes away from my house were it said these falls only happen after a good rain.
So i grabbed the family and all my gear and out the door we went. Timing is everything when shooting waterfalls, and a overcast day is best in my opinion since sunny days can cause bad highlights in waterfalls because of the shutter speed you need to use. The key to getting that silky smooth moving water effect requires a longer shutter speed of 1 - 2 seconds or what i used in this shot of 1/3 of a second.
So here's the basic set-up i used with my D90 to get this shot. I put on my Tamron 17-50mm 2.8 lens and a Hoya Polarizer filter and mounted the D90 on my tripod. I then found a good vantage spot in the water were i didn't get to wet (thanks to gore-tex boots) and set the camera to manual exposure. I set my aperture to F/10 and the shutter speed to 1/3 of a second to get that silky smooth moving water effect i was looking for and started shooting away with my remote release and that was basically it! Everything else on the D90 was standard.
I hope you get a chance to photography some waterfalls this way because it's pretty darn fun and easy! For more advanced techniques on shooting waterfalls here's a good web site you might like.
http://digital-photography-school.com/waterfall-digital-photography

9 comments:

Tomaž said...

Waterfall photos can be realy stunning. I visited a place called Hell a week ago with my new D90 and took a couple of beautiful pictures. You can check them out at my blog.

Jase said...

Thanks for this and the details of how you did it — I think it’s especially great for beginners to read about the specific settings and see that getting a beautiful shot like this isn’t as daunting as it might seem.

Scbbbc said...

Thanks Jase, I was hoping it might help someone get out there and try it themselves. Still very much a beginner myself i know reading little post like this over the last couple of years really helped me out with ideas and settings to try.

S..... said...

Nice post. I went out shooting waterfalls today as well and got good results with a set-up like yours but it was quite sunny...

Keep up the good work on this blog.

Scbbbc said...

Steve, I'm glad i could help! Show us how they came out!

Meraj said...

Hi there! Great job with the blog!

Why do you have to use a Hoya Polarizer filter? I'm not sure of its use...

Scbbbc said...

Maraj, Since your using a long exposure (up to 1 second)on waterfalls a polarizer helps keep your photo from having blown highlights....Go out and experiment and have fun....

Meraj said...

Thanks, why didn't I think of that? lol

I just got my D90 today and I can't stop playing with it. Taking it across 7000km in Mozambique next week - and I've got a 16GB card with me.

I hope I can read all your posts this week so that I enjoy myself there.

Thanks again!

Unknown said...

Excellent, je vais faire un tour ce we en guadeloupe et j'irai faire un tour dans une chute. Je te dirai ce que j'ai pu obtenir. Je dispose d'un nikon D90 + 18-105mm + 70-300mmVR + 50mm/1.8D

manuel

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