The cool rains of winter fell quite heavily yesterday so I thought it was time to take in the Barberville Falls again. I seem to head over there about the same time each year and each time I find something new and interesting to shoot. I traveled ultra-light this time, only the D3s and the Nikon 70-300 V11. The aperture on this lens did not need to be quick as I was going to be shooting at F/16 or higher, in order to get flowing water trails.
The first part of taking an image is sizing up what you want in frame. With water bounding all over and the roar of the cascading water over the cliff you can get distracted and flustered easily. That’s when it’s time to take it easy and just take in the wonderful wintery scene.
The first thing you need to do in these types of shots is to find an anchor point for the eye, that can be a boulder or a few boulders, they you look around that focus point and see what elements you want to exclude and include. The simpler and fewer these supporting elements are to the focus point the better.
My idea here was to find a foreground and background for my center subject. The idea of simple soon faded away as I began to focus instead on trying to show the scattered separate flows of water combining into one path. It was a cool blast trying to figure it out. I ended up using f/5.6 for 1/10 sec at ISO 200…With all that water flowing you only really needed to focus your bead on the rocks. Everything else came prepared via mother nature.
