I’m in love with those silky smooth waterfall shots, and now I have the right tool to help me get the job done!
Check out this nifty photo:
This is Brandywine Falls near beautiful Whistler in British Columbia. My feet froze in fear when I tried to lean over the edge to get this shot so I had to ask my dare-devil husband to get it instead…. It really didn’t take much convincing. See how the water looks like glass on the right hand side? Well this is one of the effects that I love about moving water when I slow down my Shutter Speed and I’m gonna share how I achieved this!
HOW I GOT THIS SHOT:
I guess I should say, how my husband got this shot hey?
S I D E S T O R Y: He was able to get it because he’s an adrenaline junky, and I’m not… well not as much as him at least. This crazy bear was hanging over the edge of a 200 foot drop with one arm wrapped around a tree… I was basically laying flat on the ground, covering as much of the surface with my body as I could out of fear just watching him attempt this. And I was like 10 feet away from the edge! Yup, I deserve it, call me a chicken.
Okay, back to business, first of all, this shot was taken with quite a slow Shutter Speed of 1″ (meaning one second). It’s usually difficult for me to take a hand held shot without too much camera shake anytime my Shutter Speed is slower than 1/60 (shown as 60 in camera). To recap 1/60 means one sixtieth of a second. Seems pretty quick but if I was to blow up a hand held shot at anything slower than 1/60, it probably wouldn’t look 100% sharp. It’s best to use a tripod whenever possible, but almost a necessity at anything slower than 1/60, like 1/30, 1/2, 1″, 2″ and so on. This shot however, at 1″ was hand held! If the hands were mine, they’d have been shaking like Don Knott’s in the old movie Shakiest Gun in the West, but luckily my husband held quite still.
TIP: One little trick we found handy to reduce camera shake while taking this photo was having the camera strap around my husbands neck and then having him stretch his arm, with the camera, out as far as he could so that he’ wasn’t so much trying to keep the camera steady but using the tension of the strap to hold that much more still. Hope this can help someone else too!
This is the part where my new tool came in handy. It was actually quite bright outside when this photo was taken, so to counter for the brightness, we used a Variable ND Filter. We used this because we wanted to smooth out the waterfall and in order to do so, we had to slow down the Shutter Speed to 1″. This in turn, let in more light (think sponge soaking up more water in bucket from Shutter Speed post). In fact, it let in too much light for the other two exposure settings (Aperture & ISO) to try to counter. I already had my Aperture as closed as I wanted it to be at f11 (think small pupil from Aperture post) and my ISO was as low as I could set it as ISO 100 (think least sensitive to light from ISO post). With these two settings at their max, this still would have produced an over exposed photo because of how bright it was outside.
The regular way to adjust for this would have been to increase the shutter speed, but I wanted that tasty smooth waterfall, so I threaded on my Variable ND Filter and twisted the ring until at my desired settings of ISO 100 f11 1″, the exposure bar showed that I had correctly exposed the image. Whoa, that was a lot! I’ll go into that last part in more detail below.
A Variable ND Filter is similar to a UV Filter in that it just threads onto your lens like so:
The word Variable means you can adjust how much light is let in by twisting the ring like so (I took it off the lens to better demonstrate):
The two images below correspond to the two images above and show where the marker lines up when I twist the ring. As you can see, the thicker the line, the stronger the effect.
If I know what settings I want, like ISO 100 f11 1″, then I can set those ahead of time and then thread my Variable ND Filter on. Once it’s on, I can keep twisting the ring and checking the exposure until my image is exposed correctly. I can check the exposure by pressing the shutter button half way and seeing where the little exposure bar sits. See sketches below showing to tell when the photo will be exposed correctly when looking through the eye piece or LCD screen.
And ta da! That’s how I’ve been using my Variable ND Filter. There’s a lot of other technical details that go along with it but for now this is good enough for me!
EXAMPLE:
Here’s an example of two photos taken with the idea of wanting to smooth the water. Both photos have the same exposure settings but the photo on the right was taken with my Variable ND Filter on:
See how the photo on the left is over exposed? This is because a Shutter Speed of 4″ (four seconds) will let in way too much light, even during the sunset, but with the Variable ND Filter on, like the photo on the right, I can twist the ring just right so that the sky is no longer over exposed!
FINAL THOUGHTS:
The Variable ND Filter I have lets less light into my lens by 1-1/2 stops all the way up to 8 stops – I’ll touch on stops in an upcoming post. To be honest though, when I’m twisting my filter, I’m not thinking about stops. I really just twist until I’m happy with the result. I noted how many stops my Variable ND Filter goes to because I do wish it was just a little bit stronger. There are some wicked shots I’d love to try during the day with a long exposure but in order to do so, I’d need something like a 10 Stop ND Filter. With mine, I can really only create long exposures at sunrise, sunset or in a shaded place, not during the day because that beautiful sun or ours is just too darn strong! I think a 10 Stop ND Filter would do the trick though. These puppies are a little pricy so I have to do some research to make sure I get the right one! I’ll be sure to share my notes down the road on this.
TIP: When purchasing any filter, not just a Variable ND Filter, look at the diameter of your lens that you want to use it on first. This is found on the lens itself and is shown as Φ##mm so for example, mine is Φ67mm. You can see this near the bottom of the face of the lens in the photo below:
This will help you determine what size filter you’ll want to purchase!