{"id":1587,"date":"2011-02-27T17:27:45","date_gmt":"2011-02-27T22:27:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/2d823b65bb.nxcli.io\/?p=1587"},"modified":"2011-08-17T11:38:29","modified_gmt":"2011-08-17T15:38:29","slug":"photographing-waterfalls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/2011\/02\/photographing-waterfalls.html","title":{"rendered":"Photographing Waterfalls: 1000-fold Exposure Range"},"content":{"rendered":"

When photographing a waterfall (or other forms of moving, turbulent water), the choice of shutter speed determines whether you get a stop-action view of every droplet in motion, or whether you get a smooth,\u00a0 time-averaged view of the currents.\u00a0 What is the best shutter speed to use with waterfalls?\u00a0\u00a0 I had the opportunity last year to do an experiment, an attempt to answer that question.\u00a0 Of course, there is no single “best” shutter speed.\u00a0 It is a mater of taste and creative vision.\u00a0 But the experiment was useful nonetheless, since it resulted in a visual catalog of how a waterfall looks over a thousand-fold range of shutter speeds.<\/p>\n

These pictures were all taken at Niagara Falls, with a Pentax K-7 DSLR, with a Tamron 28-75mm zoom lens at 28mm.\u00a0\u00a0 There are 21 shots, taken at 1\/2 stop shutter speed increments, from 1\/6000th of a second to 1\/6th of a second.\u00a0 In order to ensure the same exposures while varying the shutter speed I made compensatory adjustments to the aperture and the ISO settings.\u00a0 (With a neutral density filter one could extend this to shutter speeds 2-stops slower.) Post-processing was limited to white balance and cropping.<\/p>\n

So what did this tell me?\u00a0 With shutter speed down to around 1\/60th of a second, the waterfall looks pretty much the same.\u00a0 From there down to 1\/20th of a second you get gradual softening, and at the slowest shutter speeds you get effects ranging from painterly to otherworldly.\u00a0 My favorite is 1\/10th of a second.<\/p>\n

I suspect the important factors here are:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. The speed of the water<\/li>\n
  2. The distance of the camera from the water<\/li>\n
  3. The focal length of the lens<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    These combine to determine, from the perspective of the camera sensor, the speed at which the water’s image moves, in pixels\/second.\u00a0 If the image is moving at 1 pixel\/second, then shutter speeds faster than 1 second will show no blur.\u00a0 But a shutter speed of 15 seconds will show a blur over 15 pixels.\u00a0 I bet if I took the original 1\/6000 second shot, loaded it in Photoshop and applied a motion blur until it looked as close as possible to the water in the 1\/6 second exposure, I could work backwards to determine the speed of the water.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
    Shutter Speed<\/th>\nPhotograph<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n<\/thead>\n
    1\/6000 second<\/td>\n\"\"<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
    1\/4000 second<\/td>\n\"\"<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
    1\/3000 second<\/td>\n\"\"<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
    1\/2000 second<\/td>\n\"\"<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
    1\/1500 second<\/td>\n\"\"<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
    1\/1000 second<\/td>\n\"\"<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
    1\/750 second<\/td>\n\"\"<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
    1\/500 second<\/td>\n\"\"<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
    1\/350 second<\/td>\n\"\"<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
    1\/250 second<\/td>\n\"\"<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
    1\/180 second<\/td>\n\"\"<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
    1\/125 second<\/td>\n\"\"<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
    1\/90 second<\/td>\n\"\"<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
    1\/60 second<\/td>\n\"\"<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
    1\/45 second<\/td>\n\"\"<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
    1\/30 second<\/td>\n\"\"<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
    1\/20 second<\/td>\n\"\"<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
    1\/15 second<\/td>\n\"\"<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
    1\/10 second<\/td>\n\"\"<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
    1\/8 second<\/td>\n\"\"<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
    1\/6 second<\/td>\n\"\"<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    When photographing a waterfall (or other forms of moving, turbulent water), the choice of shutter speed determines whether you get a stop-action view of every droplet in motion, or whether you get a smooth,\u00a0 time-averaged view of the currents.\u00a0 What is the best shutter speed to use with waterfalls?\u00a0\u00a0 I had the opportunity last year […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1587","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-photography","7":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1587","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1587"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1587\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1844,"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1587\/revisions\/1844"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1587"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1587"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1587"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}