Waterfalls!

Shooting a decent sized waterfall has been on my List of Things I Want to Photograph for a while now. I suppose I had originally envisioned some nice Hawaiian waterfall complete with rainbow and tropical vegetation around it. Sadly, I'm not in Hawaii, but that particular shot is still on the list. I did find a waterfall not 2 miles from me though, that was fairly impressive, when you consider it was 2 miles away. It's not so tropical, and at 43ºF it certainly didn't feel tropical, but it was good enough to cross waterfall off the list.

For these shots I came over prepared. I loaded CHDK on a card ready to make use of an f stop of 16 (my canon can only do 8), screwed on my polarizer (make shift neutral density filter), and packed up my lightweight tripod. I was anticipating using a high aperture (small aperture hole) with a longer shutter speed, which is what I used, but I didn't need anything "extreme" (for my camera) at all. In fact the trickiest part of the shooting was getting into a good position to shoot.

We've had some serious rain over the last week so the falls were certainly powerful and the mist that it was throwing up was making the ground and rocks quite slippery. I wanted to get further down to shoot up the falls, but I was unable to see even a somewhat safe route to do it, so I settled for this vantage point. Though, I'm still contemplating going back and trying another angle which I thought I could probably get to... maybe.

Here's my favorite photo (so far). First one is straight out of camera, and the other one is processed with some Topaz Adjust.

Waterfalls! Straight out of camera

Waterfalls! With a little Topaz Adjust to enhance details