Waterfalls are my favorite subject in landscape photography. They are often some of the most beautiful and iconic landscapes in many national parks and mountain regions around the world.
While both amateur and professional photographers aspire to capture images of famous and elegant waterfalls, creating an exceptional waterfall photo can be difficult—not least because of its dynamically changing shape. of the waterfall but also because of the limited layout options due to the limited surroundings in many places. situation.
In this how-to article, I will share my experience using a new method to create an exceptional waterfall photo: from research of the area to field photography techniques, processing post-production and final image.
Get familiar with the topic
Along the 4.2 km loop called the Transit of Venus Walk is Edith Falls, one of three waterfalls located in North Woodford in the Blue Mountains National Park, NSW, Australia. Compared to many other large and famous waterfalls in the Blue Mountains, Edith Falls is small and often overlooked by photographers.
Indeed, at first glance, Edith Falls is not very impressive: in the dry season, Edith Falls seems insignificant, even insignificant, and the surrounding areas are filled with shrubs that obscure views from afar.
However, my intuition told me that there had to be a way to reveal the hidden beauty of this unique waterfall. I observed that there was a small pond below the waterfall, where a creek came down the hill. Most of the time, the creek is too quiet to show any interesting movement. But I know that in some extreme situations, the creek will add wonderful character to the waterfall.
In practice: Use the time-lapse method
After several recent days of heavy rain, I visited Edith Falls again. Then I noticed a big change there: there were big bubbles in the creek created from the small pond under the waterfall. I’m not sure how they formed because I’ve never seen so much foam here before.
Observing such interesting elements in the creek, I decided to use these slow-moving bubbles as a foreground to photograph Edith Falls.
The complete capture process includes two steps:
Step 1: Take multiple individual photos
Because I wanted my final image to be as sharp as possible from front to back, I took ten individual photos with the same composition, but each photo focused on a different point of the scene—focus at rocks on the right and left in the middle ground, tree branches on the right, waterfall and leaves in the background near and behind the falls.
These photos will be used in post-processing for focus stacking purposes. For example, let’s consider two different photos: one focusing on the background area and one focusing on the foreground area in the scene.
Step 2: Take 300 photos using the time-lapse method
I tried taking a few photos and quickly realized that the bubbles were moving too slowly and the daylight was too strong. As a result, I barely captured any noticeable stream movement using a 3-stop ND filter, which is an additional filter in front of the CLP on the lens, with an exposure time of exactly 1 seconds at f/11 aperture.
So I simply switched my D850 to interval shooting mode and took 300 shots in rapid succession—the method I typically use to do time-lapses. After about 5 minutes, the camera completed 300 composite photos. In theory, this would achieve a 5-minute exposure effect after stacking all these frames together.
Post-processing: Create visual impact and atmosphere
Step 1: Focus stacking to create the sharpest image from front to back
Recall that before I captured the 300 frames using the time-lapse method, I first took 10 individual photos focusing on different areas in the scene with the same composition. The purpose of this is to get the sharpest image in post-processing through a technique called focus stacking in Photoshop.
Step 2: Blend 300 frames together to achieve a 5-minute long exposure effect
The next step is to load those 300 frames into Photoshop and blend all 300 frames together to create an image with a 5-minute long exposure effect. Specifically, I simply performed the following steps in Photoshop:
- File => Script => Load Files into Stack… (download 300 raw images)
- Mark all 300 layers in the “Layers” table
- Change the blending mode from “Normal” to “Lighten”
- Layer => Flatten the image
After completing these steps, I get the following image:
Step 3: Integrate images from step 1 and step 2
It should be noted that the image obtained from Step 2 only achieves the long exposure effect; The foreground and background may not be in focus properly. So in this step, I need to combine the sharp image created from Step 1 with the long exposure image created from Step 2.
To do so, I just need to do one more “Auto-align layers…” and “Auto-blend layers…” on these two images. This way I finally created an integration image as shown in the following screenshot:
Step 4: Crop – Change image orientation if necessary
Most of the time, when I’m at the shooting range, I can quickly make a decision whether to use landscape or portrait format to capture a scene. But the situation in this environment is a little different. On the one hand, I wanted the moving creek to be the prominent foreground and thus the landscape format would be suitable for this purpose. On the other hand, as we can see, the left side of the foreground is quite cluttered and significantly distracts the view from the waterfall.
With this in mind, I decided to shoot in wide-angle landscape format, which would give me more flexibility in post-processing. Indeed, after carefully examining all the elements included in the landscape frame, I believe that cropping the image into a portrait format would result in a better composition for capturing this scene, as shown in the screenshot the following of Photoshop.
Step 5: Create the mood – Color, contrast, light and detail
After the previous steps, I got the photo as shown, has a long exposure effect for the foreground and also meets my preferred composition.
Now, what I want to achieve is to create a surreal mood to restore my emotions in the field of photography. To accomplish this goal, I first made a general color adjustment towards a cooler tone and slightly enhanced the overall contrast via the Camera Raw Filter in Photoshop. The results after such adjustment are shown as follows:
Based on the image shown above, I started focusing on lighting, detail, and color tweaking in various local areas. Although the effect from each of these adjustments looks very subtle, by combining them completely it makes the final image pop.
The processing process is quite tedious and time consuming. Here I only show how the treatment is performed in two specific local areas as shown in the red boxes in the following image.
As shown in the image above, I used the dodge and burn technique in Photoshop to enhance the color and brightness of the leaves on the left, so that this section becomes more focused and coherent with the highlight of the waterfall—see The natural light source is from the top of the waterfall.
A similar approach and technique was applied to handle the water flow in the foreground as shown in the following image.
Last word
- A successful landscape photo always starts with a successful shot in the field—not just technically sound, but also based on a well-thought-out concept and planning.
- Post-processing techniques are not as difficult to master as many people think. But the real challenge is establishing personal aesthetic concepts, which significantly influence the photographer’s work.
