P#27: A Tranquil Photograph of Flowing Water

Capturing Perfection

Brenda Tharp: This photograph of flowing water was taken in Maine. I love going to Maine and I teach workshops through the Maine Media Workshop program up there. I haven't been back in fall for a couple of years now because of other schedule conflicts, but this stream is one of my favorite places to take my groups to. (click the image for a larger version)

With this stream the water is actually flowing out of a lake. They've taken the river, dammed it, and let it out outflow naturally on the other end. It creates this wonderful almost oily viscous look to it that is highly reflective.

By pointing your lens at the scene, you can create expressive images even if you just had a point-and-shoot camera. What accentuated this photograph was using a shutter speed that allowed the water to blur a little bit in the picture, but not too much because I wanted to show this highly reflective surface that was there.

My shutter speed here was about half a quarter second just to let a little bit of motion in, to blend the water surface but still remain highly reflective. I did this was using a 200mm lens, or something right around there.

Audri Lanford: I assume you were on a tripod?

Brenda Tharp: Yes. That's a very good assumption. Not everything that I do with my expressive nature photography is on a tripod. I would say probably still 80% of it is, but there are some things that the tripod gets in your way for. The remainder of the pictures we talk about will touch on that -- when to use a tripod and when not to.

In this case, those rocks had to be sharp. It was okay that the flowing water is blurring and moving around, but the rocks had to be the sharp anchor point in the picture, so a tripod was critical for this one.

Audri Lanford: One of the things that I find really interesting with this shot is that in the flowing water right around the rocks, particularly by the rock on the left, you see these kind of circles or arcs. Those are very sharp as well, which is amazing because you've got such beautiful blurry water, but you still have that texture to it which is very cool.

Brenda Tharp: It all had to do with the type of flow -- the way the water was spilling out of this whole lake and flowing down over these rocks. It created that effect and I wanted to retain that in the picture so I couldn't go too slow with my shutter speed or it would've all blended together a little bit too much.

When you blend with a slow shutter speed, all of the colors in the water and the light and shadow areas in the water become softer and you lose some of that reflective metallic quality to it. I needed to retain that so I had to play with my shutter speed to get what I wanted, but the effort was worth it.

In Conclusion

Sometimes shutter speed can make all of the difference in the world when it comes to the mood of a photograph. Brenda Tharp tells us that in this beautiful shot of flowing water, she had to keep the shutter speed just right to blur what she wanted, keep other things sharp and retain the reflective quality of the water she was shooting.