tell me how I captured this

dylanstraub · Dec 20, 2010

I shot this a while back at Longwood Gardens (I'm not really good at keeping up with the PP) and I wanted to look at the exif data as reported by Windows. When I right click and select properties>details Windows reports that I shot this at F8 1/640 ISO 100 using aperture priority (I know, what was I thinking) manual white balance with no flash. That last one really surprised me as I've always assumed that a flash is pretty much a necessity for this kind of shot. So my question to you is, does this add up? Did Windows accurately report the exif data? Let me know what you think.

Dominantly · Dec 20, 2010

Why would flash be a necessity for this type of shot? With enough ambient light during the day, you shouldn't have a problem.
I dont see anything that really stands out as being out of place.

dylanstraub · Dec 21, 2010

I've always heard that if you are shooting water and you want any kind of detail a flash was necessary. Also the sky was not quite as bright as you see it here. I applied a gradient layer to fix the background. I guess it's not amazing that I shot it this way but I was just surprised.

Garbz · Dec 21, 2010

Rather than always hearing, try to justify everything someone says to you with how it could possibly make sense. Flash photography is essential for capturing water, or any moving object when the object moving is too fast to be frozen by the required shutterspeed, or the alternative, the fastest shutterspeed still isn't fast enough to freeze the motion.

Yes a lot of water droplets frozen in time will be the result of a flash, but then as you can see it's not needed given enough ambient light.