Shooting waterfalls

Ever since I saw a YouTube video of Karl Taylor demonstrating the effect of slow shutter speeds on moving water, I am trying to find waterfalls and stuff like that. But since I am living in the Netherlands (not at the sea side), that's easier said than done.

T: 1/800 sec (Fast shutter speed, and it's a bit dark)

So I was pretty happy when we went for a small weekend-vacation to CenterParcs (only 25 minutes of driving from our home), where they seemed to have a few nice waterfalls to my surprise. Of course they were small, and man-made, but hey: good enough to do some experiments and take some nice photo's.

T: 4 sec (Slow shutter speed)

The beautiful thing about moving water is that you can 'freeze' it with your camera, using a fast shutter speed. But when you use a slow shutter speed, the water turns into 'mist', and with this effect some really nice images can be
created.

All photo's in this blog show the same waterfall which was the nicest around, and indoors. The first image of this blog was shot with a fast shutter speed of 1/800 sec. The water in this photo seems, more or less, frozen in time. All the drops that are falling down are visible.

The second photo was shot using a slow shutter speed of 4 sec. This time the moving water is blurred out and seems to have a mist-like quality. Personally this is my favourite way of shooting water.

I moved the camera around a bit, used the zoom lens, and made some more experimental shots. Here are some of my favourites. The first one is just to show what it looks like with a fast shutter speed:

T: 1/100 sec (fast shutter speed, but should have been even faster)

Same position, T: 4 sec, nice :-)

This is my favourite waterfall photo of that day. T: 5 sec

Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 "Plastic Fantastic"

Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II

The Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II Lens is also known as the "Plastic Fantastic" or the "Nifty Fifty". It is a 50 mm prime lens, which means that it's 50 mm and that's it. There is no zoom or whatsoever.

The lens is very light, as its body is mainly made out of plastic and that's what makes this lens so cheap. It's available for around 100 Euro.

The best part is the light sensitivity. It's an f/1.8 lens so you get an enourmous amount of value for your money (Normaly, the more light sensitive a lens is, the more expensive it gets). This lens simply should be in every camera bag containing a Canon DSLR (Nikon also has an equivalent, which is just a bit more expensive if I'm not mistaken.)

Because of this light sensitivity factor, this lens can be used to shoot great photo's when there's not a lot of light to work with. But what's even better: you can make photo's with a very shallow depth of field. What this means is that you can make a photo of which only a very small area is in focus. Personally, I love these kind of images. It is a great way to draw the viewers attention to a certain part of the photo.

I could write much more about this fantastic piece of plastic, but a few examples probably say a lot more :-)

f/2.0

f/2.0

f/2.0

f/2.0