Tag Archives: waterfall
Niagara
My trip to the US and Canada a few months ago was the first time I have been over there and not suffered from jetlag. It was pretty weird. I think it’s because I went to Seattle for just a few days and my body didn’t have time to get confused before I was then coming back a little bit as I went to Toronto. There my body must have thought ‘good, we’re back to how we should be’. After a few days it got suspicious in a ‘wait a minute…this isn’t actually London’ kind of way, and so it decided to try and shut me down – but I just grabbed an early night and felt okay the next day. Then I went through a few days of very little sleep which simply confused it more.
So, I had finished work on the Thursday, switched hotels from the corporate one to a lovely personal one and then headed to the islands to shoot a skyline. I got to bed at a reasonable time. On the Friday morning, however, I was up at stupid o’clock to get the first train out of Union towards Niagara Falls. I had been to the falls once before, around 7 years ago, and remember it being lovely, and this time I wanted to go and take photos there.
I arrived at the falls with a combination of train, bus and then taxi at aroun 8:45am. I didn’t stay too long, and didn’t get too many decent shots of it. It’s pretty darn hard to get shots when the spray from the falls is so consuming and simply drenches you and the camera gear, with a fierce wind meaning an umbrella is useless. I was surprised to find I got this particular shot, to be honest, and think I had done so using the 10 stop black glass to slow it down and capture the movement a little bit.
By 10am I was on the taxi>bus>train back to Toronto, with the bus driver disbelieving I had bought my day ticket that day in Toronto due to the early hour that it was. Back at the hotel by noon I was pretty knackered, but grabbed a quick shower before meeting Edith for coffee and a quick shooting session, which was then followed by dinner at a friends house. I returned back to the hotel at around 5am the next morning for a few hours sleep before getting up to enjoy my last day in the city. All of this confused my body so much that it just gave up and decided not to inflict the jetlag on me.
I guess the moral is that you should burn the candle at both ends sometimes. Stupid moral…but it seemed to work for me. Once.
Steady Flow
Another one from Iceland today, seeing as how I did process so many of them on the flight 
There are quite a lot of waterfalls on the South side of the island…though I’m sure they have them on the North side also. This is around the base of one and was somewhere near Skogarfoss I think, we stopped here as we travelled West towards the end of our trip, and indeed towards Reykjavik.
To get this shot I was standing on a tiny small clump of grass in the middle of the river stream attempting not to step fully into the water. Here’s an Instagram shot of me getting my feet wet. I love Gore-Tex technology, but do seem to always get my feet wet.
Seljalandsfoss
This certainly isn’t the largest or most powerful of waterfalls that we visited in Iceland, however it was one of the prettiest and also was the only one which you were able to walk around the back of – though doing this meant that I, and my camera, did get rather moist.
As a daytime shot I used the B&W 10 stop filter to make the exposure longer and smooth out the water, and this also had the added effect of making the other people on the scene disappear as they walked from one side of the frame to the other in front of the lens. One of the routes to walk behind these falls is seen at the right of the image, and so the long exposure did a great job of ensuring those walking on that path simply weren’t in the final image.
We visited these falls twice on our trip, as we drove out from Reykjavik to the South East side of the island and then back. The first time was after the first night of absolutely no sleep and we arrived here pretty early and were the only people here. The second time, on our return leg, it was in the early evening of a very dreary day and it was full of tourists. It’s odd, therefore, that John chose this latter day to don his flip flops and act like a madman by standing in the freezing cold river at the base of the falls.
Anything for a photo…right?
Krimml Falls
I think the only waterfall we found while in Austria was this one, Krimml falls. I think I read somewhere it was the 5th largest in the world; a huge cascading waterfall that sure took us some time and energy to walk up. This shot doesn’t do it justice, as you can only see a glimpse of the falls – however when we arrived it wasn’t too busy at the base where we are here and I found this lovely fallen tree that just seemed to be pointing itself at the falls. There is no way a photographer could pass up the opportunity to snap this natural leading line.
It took a little patience to get this shot as when I arrived on the scene the sun was a little too high in the sky and meant that each image I took had a shaft of light where the sun was hitting the sprary, and this did not go too well with the image. After 10 minutes or so, and with my moving a little closer down to the tree trunk, this disappeared and I was able to snap this shot.
I was using the 10stop black glass from B&W so exposed this scene for 25 seconds, allowing the waterfall to turn from the chaotic mass of crashing water into this nice and peaceful, silky smooth curtain.
Golden Falls
This is Gullfoss, or Golden Falls if you want the English translation.
As many of you will know, I have just been on a trip to Iceland – and what a wonderfully pretty place it is. We had better weather than expected, as it wasn’t raining all day every day, but unfortunately we weren’t able to get much decent light in the sky even around the sunrise/sunset periods on this trip.
We stopped at these falls on the last night of the trip, and it was an unplanned stop where we decided to simply rock up as it was so close to the nearby Geyser. We had seen showers coming and going all day, and at this stage there were some awesome rainclouds in the sky, hopefully one of those images will follow at a later date.
There was nobody at this location, partially due to the time of day (it was midnight), and partially due to the weather (the wind was super, super strong). Though I was on a tripod it was being moved by the wind, so I wedged it in between a few rocks, stood as best as I could to block it from the onslaught and shoot brackets. In the end I just processed this using the single exposure as there was too much movement otherwise.
A huge thanks to John who organised and drove on the trip. I have no idea how he stayed awake while I was sat in the passenger side, head lulling, but it’s very much appreciated.
Update 06 December 2012
Here’s a workflow video which I have recorded for HDROne.com on the processing of this image.
