Camera: Nikon D60
Exposure: 0.002 sec (1/500)
Aperture: f/5.6
Focal Length: 55 mm
ISO Speed: 100
Exposure Bias: 0 EV
Flash: No Flash

I took this photo late on a sunny and windy afternoon of my summer holidays spent in Sardegna (Italy).

Inspiration came from some pictures taken by a deviant user (cycoevolution) I’m following. I choose to use a pretty short exposure time in order to achieve this frozen-sand effect and an aperture of 5.6, wide enough to produce a blurry background and a nice zone of focus.

While shooting I was lying down prone and this helped me on keeping my camera in a safe and static position. In post production I used Lightroom to add a little bit of contrast, just to make the picture more dramatic.

Export done with Picasa 3.0

View Simone Pescina’s Flickr Photostream

By Photonelly (Kris Nelson)

Camera: Canon EOS Digital Rebel XSi
Exposure: 1.3
Aperture: f/16.0
Focal Length: 18 mm
ISO Speed: 100
Exposure Bias: 0 EV
Flash: Off, Did not fire

How I got this shot:

First, this was the best of multiple attempts of capturing this scene, which is one of the many benefits of shooting digital. That allowed me to try a few different settings and review the results until I got one that I was really happy with.

In order to capture the “cotton candy” feel of rushing water in this fashion, it’s all about using a slow shutter speed. So, for starters, I put my Canon Rebel XSi into Tv mode, also known as Shutter Priority mode. This mode lets you choose the shutter speed (in fractions of a second of full seconds) and the camera takes care of choosing the aperture setting based on the light in the scene you’re shooting.

Again, since I was playing around with different settings, I tested everything from 1/2 second to about 4 seconds. This particular shot was done with a shutter speed of 1.3 seconds, which in Tv mode and the widest focal length of my kit lens (18mm) put the aperture at f/16.0.

There are other techniques for controlling the light in these exposures as well. The next one I considered was the ISO speed. The lower the ISO speed, the less sensitive your sensor will be to light. I went with the lowest setting I have on my camera, which is ISO 100. The also has the benefit of reducing noise levels that higher ISO levels would have added. If you do experiment with higher ISO settings, you’ll notice that you can shoot at much faster shutter speeds than over 1 sec.

I ended up shooting this image in RAW mode, so I didn’t dwell too much on the white balance setting that I chose for this (Adobe Camera Raw lets me switch and preview all the other WB settings for my camera later on). One of the benefits I had when setting up for this shot was that we were under a decent tree canopy over the stream. That, and the overcast skies typical of the West Maui valley we were in helped offer the soft lighting I had for this shot, and made a WB selection of Cloudy (6500K) a quick and easy choice.

In these scenes, you will often have better luck in cloudy conditions or heavily shaded areas. This is just another way to help give you the proper lighting and let you drag the shutter longer than in much brighter light.

Another thing to consider with longer exposures is a tripod and either a timer or a cable release/remote control for triggering the shutter. Since this was sort of an impromptu hike, I didn’t have my tripod with me, but I was able to improvise. My tripod stand-in for this shot was one of the large rocks like the one you see in the foreground of the shot. This is where that standard camera strap for larger DSLR cameras come in handy, because even though I didn’t want to be touching the camera during the exposure, I had my hand in the loop of the strap so I could snatch up my camera should it decide to go for a fall.

For the “hands free” operation, I did have my wireless remote control for my Rebel XSi, but the problem here was that the sensor for the remote is on the front of the camera body. Never fear though, since I just switched my shutter mode to the 2-sec delay setting, which let me press the shutter and let the camera be while the shutter was open. Shooting hands free during these types of exposures reduces the amount of camera shake or movement that would otherwise reduce the sharpness of your final image.

The last tip I wanted to mention here was how my camera’s Live Mode came in handy. Although my Canon doesn’t offer a reliable auto-focus feature in Live Mode (that or I don’t trust it), it was still of use for framing my shot because I had the camera out a ways on the rock. What I did was set the Auto Focus priority point to an area that was going to be off center to the lower left (the final image was cropped, so it looks like it was focus just on the bottom). With my AF point set, I used Live Mode to line up the foreground of the shot as I balanced the camera on the rock. When I was happy enough with the composition, I turned off Live Mode and pressed the shutter. The Auto Focus and the AF priority point took it from there.

Well, I think that just about touches on all the points I was thinking of at the time. I’m sure there are other pointers, so feel free to leave a few of your own if you like. All told, I probably shot about 3 or 4 of these before I got the exposure levels where I wanted them, and then maybe 5 or 6 from different rocks and compositions. I was lucky in that the lighting conditions were about as close to ideal as they could have been, so I didn’t need to spend a ton of time on getting this shot. Maybe 15 minutes, tops.

As far as post-production goes, I already hinted that this was a RAW image and that I use Adobe Camera Raw for processing. Since I took care in getting the look I wanted in camera, there was very little I decided to tweak in post. I just mentioned this is a cropped version, so I removed a little of the top and right of the original capture. I ended up sticking with the Cloudy WB setting, but did tweak the vibrance a little for the greens at the top.

I actually used a quick 2nd pass of the RAW image through ACR to tweak the exposure of the background at the top and then used a gradient mask to blend it into the rest of the image. That and a little sharpening pretty much wrapped it up. Total editing time was no more than 5 minutes.

View Photonelly’s Flickr Photostream