Waterfall Wonderland

Title

Waterfall Wonderland

Artist

Mike Berenson

Medium

Photograph

Description

In a world of overwhelming beauty, I used what I saw with my eyes and imagined what I could create in my mind. All those waterfalls just made my job a lot easier.

It was fun trying to imagine the long exposures turning the fast moving water into smooth white waterfalls and silky smooth flows of light blue water. It was even more rewarding being able to watch that vision come to life one piece at a time...

There's something very special about the way a long-exposure photograph can capture how turbulent water flows over stationary objects. To me, having the sharp details of the stationary object near a smooth motion blurred stretch of water does a good job of communicating motion. It's a style that's not for everyone but for me, it makes the scene.

This image was taken from Bruarfoss, Iceland under overcast skies.

How I Got The Shot
This image had some work behind it.

First, I took my time picking a good spot that showed exactly what I wanted to include in my shot. In this case, that meant walking all around the scene - on and off the bridge. I found that getting up close and personal with a wide panoramic perspective seemed to provide the unique feel I was looking for. Once I found a good spot, I set up my gear, made sure I was level, and did some composition and exposure testing with my nd filter. It's a little tougher to see the finished product of a panorama in an LCD but I was able to confirm that a few key points looked good.

I enabled auto-bracketing with a 1 stop variance so I could shoot 5 varied exposures in each of 6 positions. This bracketed approach gave me the confidence that I'd captured the scene as I wanted before leaving. I wasn't sure at the time if I would blend or what, but I knew I wanted these extra frames. With about 40% overlap on each position, I kept going for 6 unique positions giving me a total of 30 captured frames.

In post-processing, I found 10 of the frames were either too bright or too dark to be helpful so I focused on the remaining 20. I tried several approaches with these images including PTGui's HDR Stitching. I'd tried it years ago with an earlier version of the software and less experience with it. Back then, I wasn't impressed with the results, but this time with the added knowledge and experience, I had some renewed confidence to try it again.

I imported my 20 images and after some settings and steps, I had what looked like a pretty darned good result. I proceeded to test other approaches (for quite awhile) and found the results from PTGui to stand up well. After blending and stitching in PTGui, I added tonal contrast to select areas with Nik's Color Efex Pro and then added a couple of curves adjustments in Photoshop.

Photo Gear
• Camera Body - Nikon D800 Digital SLR Camera
• Camera Lens - Sigma 85mm f/1.4 EX DG HSM Lens For Nikon Digital SLR Cameras
• Tripod Head - Acratech GV2 Ball Head / Gimbal Head with Lever Clamp & Acratech Large Leveling Base
• Tripod Legs - FEISOL Elite CT-3472 Rapid Tripod Legs
• Remote Trigger - Vello FreeWave Micro Wireless Remote Shutter Release for Select Nikon DSLRs
• Filters - Singh-Ray 77mm Vari-ND Variable Neutral Density Filter & B+W 77mm 3.0 ND MRC 110M Filter


Exposure Settings - 6 unique frames stitched together with brackets (total of 20 frames)
• ISO: 200
• Aperture: f/16

• Shutter Speed: Range 0.6 - 10 seconds

Uploaded

June 25th, 2014

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