How do I photograph water without catching glare from sun?

Question

For fun, I have been trying to photograph a small, fast-moving creek near my house, and I cannot figure out how to take a picture of the creek in good lighting without it reflecting the sun and causing glare. All of the water droplets are flying around and causing a ton of problems like chromatic aberration and reflections. How do I eliminate this stuff?

Asked by J. Walker

Answer

"Good lighting" for outside pictures is pretty much dusk or dawn. If you're getting a harsh reflection of the sun at this point, you should be able to easily rotate a bit and get the sun out of your frame. In fact, some of the best light is just before the sun rises and just after it sets. There's still plenty of light to shoot with - especially for landscapes - and you'll not have to worry about these reflections and glare.

Overall, I suspect you're just shooting too much in the middle of the day.

For any lighting questions, especially those revolving around the angles and glare and such - Light: Science and Magic is a great, great resource.

Answered by rfusca

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How do I make the water silky in water/beach photography?

Question

I see beautiful photos of beaches or rivers/streams where the water looks like frosted glass...

How is this effect achieved?

Is it a longer exposure?

Asked by Steve

Answer

As others have said, it depends a lot on what kind of effect you want on the water and how much light is available.

What I usually do is decide on how milky I want the water and then find out the time needed to get there. Note that the speed and volume of water impacts the result, so the thinner the stream/flux is the more time you need.

Here is a shot that required six seconds in order to achieve the effect I wanted. Fortunately the scene was under the trees on a heavily cast day and I wanted to use a smaller aperture (8.0 in a Canon compact) resulting in a bigger depth of field, otherwise there would be too much light for the shot:

If you are shooting at night, you may use even longer times, 15 seconds for example, before overexposing the picture:

Note that on such long exposures, if you want someone to be part of the scene, be sure they stand really still. Here again, 15 seconds were used to make sure the water was milky enough:

If, on the other hand, your scene is in plain daylight (by noon, even worse), you will certainly need a powerful ND filter, in order to allow the same 15 seconds. Here two of them were used, an external one with 9 steps and the camera built in, with 3 more steps:

Answered by André Carregal

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How do I lengthen shutter speed with out washing out the picture?

Question

I read this question, and I tried some long exposure shots myself. Every one of my shots though, is washed out. How do I achieve a long shutter speed while keeping the lighting natural?

Asked by J. Walker

Answer

You still need to expose correctly! Exposure is covered in depth in this answer. What you've done is increase one leg of the exposure, by using a longer shutter speed. Now you need to decrease the overall exposure by the same amount to get back to a properly-exposed image.

So for example, if your camera's exposure meter told you to take a picture at 1/60 s, and you carried all the settings over to manual mode but changed the shutter speed to 1/4 s, you have added four stops of light to your exposure and need to remove them.

You can reduce the exposure through in-camera settings:

• lower your ISO, as long as you weren't already shooting at the lowest ISO ("for the best quality"). If you were at 200 ISO, though, you could get one stop back by lowering the ISO to 100.
• use a smaller aperture. If you were already at f/11 to get the most depth of field for your picture, or if you're using a P&S camera without good aperture control, there's not much you can do here. But if you were shooting wide open you should be able to get several stops back.

You can also try to reduce the exposure by decreasing the amount of light coming in to your lens. There are two ways to do this:

• if you're impatient, use a filter. There are several strengths of ND filters, which are rated by how many stops of light they restrict. Polarizing filters typically cut out between 1 and 2 stops of light and also have other uses, so if you just want to buy one filter, a circular polarizer might be a better value than an ND filter.
• shoot when there's less light. Either wait for a cloudy day, or shoot at dawn/dusk, or shoot at night.

Answered by drewbenn

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Do you have any suggestions for poolside photography?

Question

I'm going to photograph an event which will happen in a outdoor spa: pools with brilliant architecture and people having a good time. I think that most of the pictures will be taken at night.

I hope my description is not too vague. So if you have any suggestions, they would be very welcome.

Answer

Sounds like a fantastic shooting opportunity! A couple of suggestions that spring to mind:

• Use the surface reflection of the water. If there are lights nearby you'll get some great effects with them reflected across the water. Likewise that "brilliant architecture" you mention should look even better with a rippled reflection beneath it.

• If your camera will let you, push the ISO high and the aperture wide to get a fast shutter speed. Try to capture those people "having a good time" in the water with splashes frozen in mid air.

• If there's underwater lighting, try some very low angles - basically with the camera as close to the water level as you dare. You should get some great portraits with very unusual, exotic looking lighting.

Good luck and have fun!

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How can I affect color of a water droplet shot?

Question

Experimenting with water droplets today. Pretty fun! I'd like to ask how can I improve upon it. First of all a picture of the setup:

Water is contained within a plastic bag that is taped to a tall-ish black lamp. Water drops into a big bowl that is covered with black plastic because the bowl itself is white. Flash is pointed towards a styrofoam background that is all white. Kinda ghetto home setup but it mostly works :) Now a sample of the results, SOOC:

Although the results actually turned out quite pleasing, my first expectation was for the color to follow the background, that is I was expecting it to be all or mostly white. However this is not the case, as there is some black there. How do I fix this if I want the color of the shot to be mostly white?

Thank you!

Answer

If you want the shot to be white, don't put a black bin bag in the bowl. If you want to add a touch of colour, try putting some coloured gels (or any coloured transparent plastic) over the flash. I'd try it without the diffuser as well.

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How do I take a shot like the flooded tree by Andrew Tallon?

Question

How did he make it look like this? What settings did he use and any special equipment? If anyone has any pointers, that'd be great!

Answer

This reddit comment goes into detail on what the photographer did:

Here's a summary of the settings, technique and post processing used for the photo, taken from a comment on my wallpaper post a month ago:

Canon 5D mkII DSLR + 28mm f/1.8 USM lens. Filters are extremely important for this shot. We shot pre-sunrise at a muddy/sandy area on the coast about half an hour from where I live. Plenty of mangroves and a few trees out in the open like this one that are mostly above ground but start to flood at high tide. I wanted to smooth over the water as much as possible which requires an ultra long exposure, but shooting straight into a bright sun means I needed to use a huge amount of darkening with my filters. After composing the shot without the filters (too dark to see through the viewfinder once they're on), I stacked an ND400, an ND8 and two ND4 grad filters on the front of the lens. The NDs helped slow the shutter speed and the grads helped darken the sky for a more pleasing effect. It took a few attempts at getting my exposure right, but the final result was shot at ISO50 (keeping sensitivity down), f/8 (good sharpness on this lens) and 70 seconds. To get any shutter speed past 30 seconds on a DSLR you need a remote switch, I picked one up off ebay for 4 bucks.

Post processing: This is the one photo that everyone asks or assumed is heavily processed, but it's had hardly anything done to it. I corrected for the red tinge that comes from the cheap filters and added some contrast and blacks for the tree silhouette, and that was it. It's great to see that in the end, nothing beats a photo that was constructed well in-camera. Here's a comparison of original RAW file to final copy.

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