H20

Week 8

This week is about water. I've pointed my camera at it lot of times - rivers, boats, waterfalls, reflections, rain.... But there had to be a way to photograph water in a way I hadn't tried before.

This is a rock in the Bow River downstream of the spillway on the lagoon that forms Prince Island in the Eau Claire district in Calgary. I am standing above the rock on other rocks shooting more or less straight down from 2 feet or so as the water rushes by. Click on it and have a closer look at the strings of light in the water. I'm not sure what caused that but for me it is the best part of the picture and although this one doesn't grab attention right away I like the abstract quality.

I wanted to smooth out the water with a slow shutter speed. I didn't have a polarizer or neutral density filter so I just set the aperture as small as I could and the ISO as slow as I could. The camera is a D3 at ISO 100 (L1.0) and the lens is a Nikkor 50mm f1.8 set at f22. Exposure time was 1/10 of a second. Post processing in Photoshop consisted of darkening and increasing the contrast with curves.

Idea based on Just Add Water, pages 56-59 in the book 50 Photo Projects, by Lee Frost