With absolute ease you can take some great photos of small rivers, brooks and streams. If your pictures of such streams or waterfall run-offs are not coming out great, take a look at these 5 simple tips and try them out in your next trip. You will most certainly see a lot of improvements in your style and consequently the quality of your pictures.
All you need is a simple DSLR camera, although these techniques can be applied to all your photos, even the ones you take with your cell phones. There could be slight variations depending on how much you can control the exposure and the speed.
In these examples, I have used a Nikon DSLR on my trusted Gitzo tripod and in some situations I have used a circular polarizer. I mostly use Nikon, B+W, Lee or Singh Ray Circular Polarizers. If you are using your cell phone camera you can still use your circular polarizers though managing both the phone & the accessories could be a little difficult.
5 Easy Tips to enhance pictures of rivers, brooks & streams
Tip 1: Shoot wide to very-wide angle
Wide angle photos pull the viewer into the picture and almost let the viewer be part of the picture. Especially when you make big immersive prints of these pictures they almost re-create the same beautiful environment that made you take the picture in the first place.
Wide angle photos come out extremely well if you are very close to the water itself, but even if you are not that close to the water and want to use your wide angle lens, you can still do that with some interesting foreground – a simple rock, a small shrub or even a simple leaf in the foreground could make a great picture.
Tip 2: Get on your knees & shoot low
Yes, you have to get dirty! I often sit inside the stream or find a rock to be able to put my feet on and have the tripod in the stream to be able to get low enough to get the right shot.
When you frame a shot like this, you are likely to get highlights on the top part of your picture and there is a possibility of getting the lower half (from the example above) under-exposed. I always expose for the closer part and try to balance the over exposure either with my gradual ND filters (I mostly use Lee filters for these) or if the latitude is not more than 3 or 4, I know I can make that up in Lightroom and still get sufficient details in the farther regions.
Tip 3: Find a foreground subject
It does not have to be “interesting” but you can always “make it interesting” for the overall picture. In this example, I used a very wide angle lens, shot from a very low angle and I used this rock as a foreground. The rock is nothing interesting photogenically but without this foreground rock, the picture would fall apart.
The common mistake that people make in a situation like this is with the focus. With such a wide depth, there is a possibility that either the foreground or the background could be out of focus. The worst situation is that the foreground is completely out of focus and shows up as a big, unclear blob occupying a critical part of your picture!
I recommend focusing about 12 – 15 feet from you and using a high aperture like f/11 or f/16 at least. If you are shooting digital, you may be able to enhance the sharpness a little more in your software.
Tip 4: Catch the drama of the water
While taking pictures, many of us are too focused on the technical aspects of the picture and miss out on the aesthetics. Take a step back, walk around, walk into the streams and out of it till you can feel the rhythm of the water. If you can hear the mild rumbling of the water as it flows over and around and under the rocks, you know you have found the synergy.
Sometimes I get close enough to be able to see even the smallest movements of water over the rocky floor of the stream. I tried to capture some of that in this example above. What helps is an overcast sky in these situations. That is one reason why I often go out to take pictures on rainy days!
Tip 5: Zoom into an interesting pattern of water movement
In this example, I walked around this small pool of water for a while and nothing caught my eyes till I started to look close and zoomed into this small pile of rocks. Such a small part would usually escape most people’s attention and in all likelihood this is such a common scene that no one would ever look closely at this.
Such small and apparently insignificant spots also have aa lot of drama and beauty going on. And you can capture that using a zoom lens. I also used a circular polarizer and a ND filter to slow down my shutter speed. This allowed me to get the small curvatures on the rocks underneath the small sheet of water flowing over them.
Go out and try these out. And while you do, do not stop from experimenting further and you will be amazed at how many creative things you can do with these rivers, small brooks and with all but the simplest of the cameras.