----- Original Message ----- From: "Shel Belinkoff" Subject: RE: PAW--Yet Another Waterfall
> Indeed! > > What really gets to me is the so frequent and seemingly well accepted, and > trite use of long exposures and blurred, smooth moving water. How much > more interesting moving water photos might be if they showed the water more > like we see it, which, of course, would require shorter shutter speeds. I > seem to recall reading somewhere that shutter speeds in the area of 1/15 or > 1/30 would provide more realistic results, but I could well be wrong about > the exposure time. 1/30th is pretty close. I'm not commenting on Peter's photo specifically her, so bear with me. Even on 35mm, sometimes you have to stop down rather a lot to get sufficient depth of field, and this extends the exposure time. On large format, it is possible to break the (sometimes) several second times required to secure exposure down into a multiple short exposure session, but this isn't really practical if the required exposure is more than a second or two. Imagine cocking and shooting 30 times on the same frame to build up a 1 second exposure from 1/30 second exposures. It can be done, I've done it, and the results are somewhere in between a short exposure and a long one. > > For those of you who photograph water scenes, how about moving away from > such clich� photos and try to put a little more thought and creativity into > what you're doing instead of making what is essentially the same photograph > over and over. One could say the same thing about any photographic style, be it landscape photography or shooting down and out street people for pathos effect. With waterfalls there can be some very real technical problems with going to a different approach. William Robb
