I had a request to share how I captured the water shots during my photography lesson in Colorado recently.
Other than a DSLR camera, the most important piece of equipment is a tripod. I found out mine pretty much sucked. One day I will get a tripod with a ball head on it. The photographer and I both used zoom lenses. Prime lenses are not good for landscape, they are for portraits.
It was about 6:45 am in Colorado and freezing cold. It’s a good thing I had a tripod because I was shivering, but the real reason you need a tripod is you must have a really slow shutter speed to capture these images. The next photos will be straight out of the camera (SOCC) which means no editing.
The above pic is same shot. Notice how different the water looks?
This one was shot at:
We reduced the ISO from 100 to 50 and the shutter speed from 1/15 to 1/2
I also used a 2 second delay to prevent camera shake while pushing the shutter release button.
The next photo is the one you saw above. This one is SOOC.
It was shot at:
The lens I used was a zoom 24-70mm. My teacher had a 24-105mm. And we used an aperture of 22 for all of the images. He told me the sweet spot was f11 for my lens, but we needed to use f22 for these shots. I wish I could remember why, but I think my brain was shaking while I was shivering and it made me forget.
I am still grasping all this info. It takes a long time for apertures, shutter speeds, ISO, etc to all sink in. The more you practice and read the more you will understand. Take time to know your camera. You spent a lot of money on it so use it to it’s full potential.
If you would like to see some of the images by my photography teacher, Allan Ivy, then go here. They are amazing.
