waterfall (1st upload so sorry If i mess it up)

[masquerad101]

This is a photo of a waterfall In county antrim. It was taken some years ago and feel free to C&C.

 

[480sparky]

It's WAY too dark. There's no details in the shadows, far too contrasty........... and the waterfall looks like automotive anti-freeze.

 

[masquerad101]

It dosent look like that normally. I think I messed up while resizing for upload. If you click on the image and view it in full screen it looks better.

 

[480sparky]

It still has a lot of dark areas with no details, and the water still looks like someone dumped green food coloring into the river.

 

[masquerad101]

Ok thanks. Have you any advice on how to take that shot better the next time? Like settings and filters etc... That area of woodland is extremely dark so it was hard t get the exposure correct.

 

[tecboy]

Go early in the morning or late in the evening to shoot this kind of pics. Play around the exposure setting. Also, play around the motion blur. The motion blur is pretty high.

 

[masquerad101]

Thanks again. Do you think Filters would benifit me like ND filters?

 

[480sparky]

If you go there when the sun is going down, you won't need any ND filters.

 

[masquerad101]

Ok cheers. Thanks for the advice. Ill definatley give it a try. Im glad I joined the forum because you would otherwise have to pay for this kind of help...wait... you dont expect me to pay you?...Do yo?

 

[tecboy]

Oh yea, one more thing. If you used post processing, the contrast is too high. Hope that helps!

 

[masquerad101]

Yes thanks. It's far to easy to over process photos especially with contrast. I've been guilty of doing that with a lot of shots. Thanks for the advice

 

[ShooterJ]

I'm not seeing any green cast to the water or overly dark shadows? Did it get edited re-posted already?

 

[ShooterJ]

Thanks again. Do you think Filters would benifit me like ND filters?

You didn't have a horizon, bright sky or sun to contend with in this shot.. so not sure why you would need an ND filter any time of the day?

 

[masquerad101]

No filter needed then thanks shooterj. It has not been re-edited or re-posted and I don't see the green in the water either. I was a bit confussed when sparky mentioned it. I'm glad you noticed cause I Was starting to wonder was my monitor broken. Do you think the water looks ok and what do you think about the contrast?

 

[amolitor]

There's a bunch of problems here.

There's too much range in the scene to capture in one exposure, you have shadows with no detail ("blocked up") AND you have highlights with no detail ("blown out"). You can use multiple exposures and combine them, you can choose to lose shadows, highlights, or both. You might be able to shoot RAW and recover some or all of the lost information, since RAW has more dynamic range than JPEG.

There's a strong green cast to the spraying water as has been noted. This might be ambient lighting, though. There seems to be a LOT of green around, possibly the light cast on the water was simply greenish. It's not very attractive, though. Making some changes to the so-called "white balance" might be indicated, or you could simply selectively de-saturate that part of the water a bit.

The composition is fairly nice, but I feel like the small background waterfall is not very well placed. It is where it is, obviously, but by moving the camera around you can change the relationships between the objects you see. The foreground waterfall gives a nice strong diagonal, but the small waterfall in the background is neither aligned with that line (imaging if it were at the very right edge of the frame) nor definitely opposed to that line and balancing it (imagine if it were a fair bit to the left). A few steps to the right or left would, I think, have made this a better frame.