How to Take Better Waterfall Photos - Drainpipe Falls Adventure

so where we headed we are heading to what I've called drainpipe Falls which is near Victoria on Vancouver Island in an attempt to get a shot like this [Music] [Music] so off we go chasing waterfalls on the rainiest day of bloody January Navin Coover Island has thousands of waterfalls and the trick is knowing when to visit I'd been to this one many times recently but the water level was just never quite right but on this day I could feel it in my giblets we would get the shot with this video I'm gonna show you how I capture texture and detail in my waterfall images this technique could help you to create more dramatic and inspiring images that show the true power of water I always enjoy showing somebody a new place for the very first time look at Brent's face when he lays eyes on this waterfall or photo orgasm and you can't blame him look at that business people often ask me why I moved to Vancouver Island and this right here is just one of the many reasons why it's such a beautiful place even in the darkest depths of January it's not often that Brent gets that excited about a location so it was kind of funny to watch him totally nerd out over this [Music] so we've made it to drain pipe Falls pretty easily no disasters just yet the water floor is perfect I've never seen it like this we're two very happy bodies so let's get into the meat and veggie of this video and that is how to capture as much texture and detail in the water as possible first of all let's look at the raw files and talk about the camera settings that I decided to use while I was shooting this first exposure was shot with an aperture of f/8 for great depth of field and maximum sharpness on that particular lens and I used a long exposure time of 13 seconds so this is a very overexposed frame my next frame was shot at two-and-a-half seconds which was the shutter speed that the camera was recommending that you know the light meter in the camera and even though the light meter was telling me that two-and-a-half seconds was ideal it's still not fast enough for me to capture water detail because you as you can see the water is just a mushy white blur so I decided to shoot a couple more faster frames even though I knew they'd be underexposed and quite dark the next frame was shot at a quarter of a second which I achieved only by opening up the aperture to F 2.8 I would have much preferred to have stayed at FA but it was getting dark and I needed as much light as I could get and even though it's clearly underexposed and quite dark you can see it captured much more detail in the water and finally for the next frame I went for an even faster shutter speed of one sixth of a second and this is the one that I'm going to use to blend with the first overexposed frame so that overall we get much more dynamic range step one is going to be processing the overexposed image and even though the water in this image is completely smoothed out all I really want from this image is everything but the water I might choose to keep a few parts of the silky water movement but for the thicker sections of water I'll be getting rid of that mushy white stuff I'll open this in Adobe Camera Raw and bring down the exposure slightly that's the first thing I'll do then I'll brighten up the shadows by about plus 18 and then brighten the blacks to about +8 and I'll also punch the color vibrance up a little bit to about +8 and then I'm just gonna hit open image to bring that into Photoshop step two processing the underexposed image and the first thing I need to do is increase the exposure and that needs quite a lot of brightening up this brightens up the image but it also kills some of the detail in the brightest sections of the Whitewater and I'll fix that by pulling the highlights down to about minus 27 and white down to about minus 17 and then I'm ready to just hit open and bring that into Photoshop step 3 I'm gonna stack and align the layers in Photoshop I can easily stack the overexposed image on top of the darker image by clicking in the layers panel and simply dragging it to the tab for the underexposed image a Photoshop will drop a copy of that layer on top of whatever's already there and I'll align the layers just in case there was any camera movement in between shots by making sure that both layers are unlocked and then I go to edit Auto align layers and I'll just go with the default Auto align and just hit OK but as you can see in this case nothing really happened because there was just no misalignment in between shots step 4 selectively erasing the overexposed water so if you look in my layers panel here you can see the overexposed shop is on the top layer and the underexposed shot is underneath that all I'm gonna do is use the eraser tool which you can select here and I'm just going to erase through that so if you see me erase here you can see it reveals what's underneath now I'm just gonna undo that and make sure that the opacity of my brush is at 100% and what I'm using is a soft brush and the size of the brush that depends on the area that you're erasing so for now I'm gonna use a slightly larger brush by hitting my left and right bracket keys left is small right is large so I hit the right bracket key and that creates a much larger brush so that it raises a bigger area now I'll reduce the brush and get in a little bit closer to these rocks and fine-tune this process of it and I'm constantly changing the brush size now my top tip is to use a brush size that is let's just undo that one I'll kind of light that use a brush size that's a little bit larger than you think you might need because if you use a really small brush size like if I'm if I'm doing this you'll see that halo edge around the the rocks there so that looks kind of rubbish so let's undo that and I'm gonna use a bigger brush and I'm just gonna very selectively just brush in and just it is parts of the water that are just kind of boring and just pure white to reveal those more interesting parts underneath that have a bit more texture in detail and you don't have to do all of it so for example these parts appear I kind of like those I'm just gonna get use a bigger brush there and just kind of dot in and take out the less interesting parts same over here let's get a smaller brush I brush into there smaller brush there and just take your time enjoy the process this is this is an enjoyable experience that you don't need to rush ok I think that's pretty much it now another thing you can do it's changed as I showed you earlier the opacity defaulted to 50 that's because I was practicing this earlier if I go back to 50 the effect of erasing through these layers is not going to be as dramatic and for this section of the waterfall here that's probably gonna work better so let's get a slightly a bigger brush and just erase through there there we go to blend that better I'm gonna go for an even bigger brush I'm just gonna take out this whole section up there there we go that blends far far more smoothly and lastly with our final step we're going to fine-tune the blending to make the two layers blend more seamlessly I'm gonna make the overexposed layer slightly darker so I'll choose image adjustments brightness contrast and I'll set the brightness to about minus 38 I can also brighten up the darker exposure underneath slightly so it gets closer to the brightness of the overexposed layer on top by going to image adjustments shadows highlights and then I'm going to set the shadow amount to three percent so this results in a nice flat looking image that has great dynamic range with lots of texture detail and motion in the water and this gives you a great starting point to begin the processing of your image so that's it that's basically how I capture more texture more detail and more drama in my waterfall images from this point on how you decide to process your waterfall images is entirely down to you to get the finished product that you see here I really all I did was a bit of dodge and burn I change the contrast in certain parts of the image and just enhance some of the colors but for your own waterfall images you'll probably do something completely different once you've fixed the motion and texture in the water depends if it's a waterfall of a forest or a desert scene it's entirely down to you if you enjoyed this video it would be awesome if you could hit that subscribe button give us a like help me get this channel off the ground and please let me know how I can make these videos better and what you'd like to see in the future so that's it from me Gavin Hardcastle at fort Ripper calm thanks for watching see you later so Gavin here had some gastro intestinal distress and proceeded to drop his drawers and use some of our tickets - yeah my hero that was so disturbing to see that

Channel: fototripper

Views: 29,390

Keywords: waterfall photography tutorial, photoshop tutorial, long exposure photography, vancouver island, british columbia, bc, drainpipe falls, rain, winter, moss, mossy, gopro

Id: HaRa1WYjMB0

Length: 10min 35sec (635 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 28 2018