Photographing falling water can be trickier than it sounds. At first thought you might think, what’s the big deal? Just point and shoot. The water is in the photo…falling.
A so-so image. Overblown sky. Indistinct shadows. A weak waterfall.
But does that photo convey the power, the movement, the beauty of the falls?
Generally, in order to make the water look dynamic and beautiful you have to do a long exposure on the falls. This gives you the smooth, glossy, almost salt like look that we love to see in waterfall pictures. The problem is, if you do a long exposure for the water, the rest of the photo can be blown out.
You could lower your aperture, ISO, and put a neutral density filter on your camera to allow you to run the shutter for a longer period of time without over exposing the surroundings and that definitely works in some scenarios. However, if you have a lot of foliage or other moving objects in the scene, then each of those tiny movements will be recorded the image causing your image to be fuzzy and soft.
In situations these situations you would do better to shoot multiple exposures.
A much better photo with detail in the lights and shadows and a fuller waterfall.
This can be done in several ways.
First, you could set your phone or camera to HDR mode. It will snap a handful of images at different exposures and process them together in the blink of an eye. You’ll get a pretty good photo, but that water will still be pretty weak looking because Auto HDR just can’t leave the shutter open long enough.
A second way is to shoot using bracketing. This essentially does what the HDR setting does, but instead of processing all of the images together, it leaves them as individual photos. Then you can use HDR software on your computer or manually process them. The benefit of this is you usually have the ability to specify how wide the range is between exposures, but it’s still not going to be nearly long enough for a waterfall.
The third way is the one described in this video and the one used in the image above. Just manually take 3 photos at the exposures you want and process them using masks in Photoshop. In the 3 images below I exposed the bright one for 20 seconds, the middle one for 4 seconds, and the dark one for 1 second, a range that is impossible with bracketing.
20 second exposure for the waterfall
4 second exposure for foliage
1 second exposure for sky
The important thing to keep in mind when photographing this way is to ONLY CHANGE THE SHUTTER SPEED. The position of the camera, the focal length, the ISO, the Focus, and the Aperture must all stay the same! If you change any of those things, the images won’t blend together smoothly.
You could take more than 3 shots, but I find that gets too difficult to edit and since you can adjust the opacity of the layers and brushes in Photoshop, you can achieve any level in between these exposures that you want.
When you’re ready to edit, import all 3 photos as layers on Photoshop. I usually put the light at the top and the dark at the bottom. Then I put a black mask on the light layer and a white mask on the mid layer. Black masks hide everything on that layer allowing whatever is below them to show through. White masks show everything on that layer and hide everything below it. (See below for example)
3 Layers with 2 masks
Then in order to process the image, I paint white using the brush tool onto the black mask on the light layer wherever I want the image to be brighter, such as the waterfall or under the ledge. Then I use a black brush on the white mask from the mid layer to hide spots on that layer allowing the dark layer to show through. Keep at this, blending and adjusting the opacity of your brush and before long you’ll have an image with more depth and detail than you thought was possible.
Merge all of these layers together by selecting all 3 layers and pressing Windows: CTRL+ALT+Shift+E or Mac: CMD+Option+Shift+E. That will give you a new merged layer that you can then edit just like you would any other photo.
Merged final layer that can be edited like a normal image
Check out the video for more detailed instructions.