Controlling Flowing Water

Creative photography is more than simply capturing an image in front of your lens. As photographers, we must evaluate the scene we see and make decisions about the fine points of composition, lighting and the use of camera technique.

This image was made on a hike in Rocky Mountain National Park. As we walked along this creek, I was on the lookout for an area with water flowing over rocks. I also wanted the stream to be bounded by trees. The trees in this photo create a frame for the water.

Although this picture looks very warm and sunlit, in fact the day was overcast and the capture was quite blue. I used some of the gray rocks as reference points for color balancing but ended up adding more red to “pop” the colors of the rocks, trees and bark. While the color balance I ended up with is warmer than the actual scene, it imparts the feeling I had on the hike. Keep this in mind when you are working on an image. You don’t want the color balance to become intrusive, but you also need not present the image as you captured it if you can make it better.

This photo was captured with a shutter speed of one second. By stopping my lens down to f/20 (the smallest aperture I could obtain at ISO 100) I was able to use a very long shutter speed to allow the whitewater to blend into cotton candy streamers. Without the use of a tripod, this would never have been possible. One leg of my tripod ended up in the water for this composition and as soon as I pulled it out of the water I dried it off on my t-shirt. Take care of your gear and it will take care of you.

Finally, I added a slight vignette to the photo to make sure that the visual focus of the image was in the center on the water and rocks. In Photoshop I selected Filter>Distort>Lens Correction and applied about 15 points of darkening to the corners of the image.