How to make waterfall photos look smooth
Today I wanted to give you some tips on how to make your photos of waterfalls better. The most important thing in this post is exposure time, longer exposure = better overall photo of waterfalls. :)
What you will need to have so this photo can be smooth is camera with manual mode where you can control aperture and shutter speed. And one most important thing in equipment is tripod! You need to use tripod because you are making long exposure.
Look at these two photos, they are pretty different but composition is almost the same and lighting as well. What photo do you like more? Smooth or sharp?
In my opinion, smooth photo gives much better representation of reality and what we can see, maybe a little bit exaggerating. Second one looks just like a snapshoot and that's all.
| Camera | Lens | Shutter speed | F-stop | ISO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Canon 600D | Sigma 17-50mm | 0.6 sec. | f/22 | 100 |
| Camera | Lens | Shutter speed | F-stop | ISO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Canon 600D | Sigma 17-50mm | 1/400 sec. | f/2.8 | 100 |
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But if you want to have this kind of effect you will need pretty high f stop number so you can have slower shutter speed. Even tho I placed my aperture to f/22, which is the higher number I can get with my lens, I got around 0.6s max and I lost some sharpness because of diffraction that lens gives at higher number f stop. So, one thing that would help you to get even slower shutter speed is ND filter that can reduce a lot of light that is coming to your image sensor but I don't have that so I had to do it different.
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For this effect you don't need a lot of equipment, you can even try using your phone that has manual mode. But only thing that is essential is tripod which you can buy pretty cheap. Mine is around 20$ max.
Thank you for stopping by! Have a nice day! :)