Waterfall, Strath Fionan
I've been trying to find a way to photograph this waterfall for about a year; very tricky to find an angle, especially in daylight, in which the fragment of sky doesn't form an annoying distraction.
So after a bit of thought and several flashes of inspiration later, I returned and spent 1.5hr standing in the waterfall as dusk fell, watching blue-hour turn to twilight and seeing the relative contribution of my own lighting increase.
In the final selection of frames, the ambient light was low - at ISO 200, wide aperture and long 2s exposure, the water barely left any impression on the image.
To light-paint the scene, I chose:
two Manfrotto continuous LED lights - one supporting a glass ball on the rocks, one held up high+left angled to skim the rocks both near and far;
two Yongnuo 560IV flash units - one on camera, very low power with a Rogue Flashbender diffuser to gently illuminate the foreground rocks, one held by hand up high+right, full power, pointing at the bulk of the waterfall, biassed toward the top of the cascade.
One of the advantages of pixel-shift is that any exposure happens four times in quick succession: this allowed me to vary the angles of the two hand-held lights between frames before blending the favourite images together.
Lighting by area: sky: natural ambient; rocks top-left and distant right: LED light-painted; rocks bottom-left: flash; waterfall: flash, with the intentional consequence of freezing the fast-flowing water despite the low light levels. Makes a change from long-exposure brushed-cotton-wool water!
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GPS location: 56.6828687333019, -4.08320108349267
Tags
- light
- blue-hour
- concept
- prop
- glass-ball
- toned
- flash
- sigma-24-70-fe-art
- snapseed
- places
- scotland
- imagemagick-median
- contrasts
- rock-water
- artificial-light
- glowing
- blur
- emotion
- beautiful
- led-lights
- dynamic
- colour
- strange
- sony-a7r3
- perthshire
- wet
- zen
- stacked
- near-far
- phenomena
- nature
- landscape
- intimate-landscape
- raw
- filter
- gobe
- serif-affinity-photo
- water
- jumble
- affection
- highland-perthshire
- digikam
- turbulence
- idyll
- innocence
- after-dark
- pixelmator-photo
- waterfall
- short-exposure
- freeze-frame
- sharp-soft
- mixed-light
- rannoch
- flowing
- ultralightapp
- striking
- motion
- movement
- dusk
- sumptuous
- slow-fast
- light-painting
- moment
- motion-stationary
- timefulness
- dark
- numinous
- imposing
- light-and-dark
- time
- land-water
- composition
- balance
- oddity
- hard-soft
- favourite
- achievement
- bright-glowing-colour
- strath-fionan
- awe
- meaning-emptiness
- manfrotto-led-light
- crazy-art
- drama
- pixel-shift
EXIF info
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Date and Time:
2020:03:13 01:03:48