Shooting Waterfalls from MPB

Hey, what's up, guys? Professional outdoor photographer David Johnson here for Outdoor Photography Guide. Today, I'm talking about waterfall photography. You know, what do you see when you go to a waterfall? How do you photograph it? How do you compose it when you are out there at your favorite waterfall location? Now, today I'm at one of my favorite waterfall locations in Tennessee. As you can see, it's a huge drop-off waterfall, but what I love about this waterfall so much are the possibilities that it gives me as an outdoor photographer. I can use a variety of lenses here, a variety of compositions, and I can play around with a lot of different type of photographs when I do come here, which is what I want, because it gives me more bang for my buck. A lot of other waterfalls that you can visit have one great compelling composition, maybe two, but for the most part, that's it. With a waterfall like this, with so many lines, cascades, rocks in the foregrounds, you can spend all day here and really find a lot of different compositions to work with when you are framing up a shot. So when you're using a wide-angle lens for your waterfall photography, it gives you a lot of ability to use anchor points within your composition. Now, anchor points are those really big strong foreground elements that kind of hold the composition down to the bottom, it anchors it. And you can do this both shooting horizontally and also shooting vertically, so there's not one against the other. Now, for wide-angle lenses specifically, what I'm using here is a Fujifilm GFX 50S with a 23-illimeter lens. I got this camera secondhand, actually, from mpb.com. It's a great option if you're looking to get camera gear, but you want it secondhand, a little bit cheaper, but for basically like new quality. So this camera has been tremendous on today's trip, capturing everything in a medium format. Now, medium format means that you have a bigger sensor size even than a full frame camera. So with a 23-millimeter lens, while that's a wide lens on a full frame, that's like ultra-wide on a medium format, and it gives me all the opportunities in the world to create these little anchor points with all these boulders that are going on in front of me. You have different shapes in boulders, and what I like to do is pair multiple shapes together. So I have triangular shapes, I have lines of logs that have fallen into the water before me, and also the lines on the shoreline. I like to pair those together to create leading lines that you throughout the frame. So all of these foreground elements with a wide-angle lens are really important when you're composing your shot, because the foreground and these anchor points are almost as important as the main subject of your photograph, which is the waterfall in the background. I'm at a two second exposure, F16 ISO 100, and it's giving me that perfect silky smooth water that I want for my waterfall photography shots. Now, while I do love a great wide-angle shot for waterfalls, I'm kind of finding myself gravitating to a lot of the detail shots with more of a longer lens that you can get for waterfall photography. So the next lens I'm gonna be using for this shot is a 110-millimeter lens, and that's gonna help me get a lot of those fine detail shots of the cascade for this waterfall that's really coming down and help me freeze a lot of those designs in their tracks. So what I like to do with that is really single and on very specific parts of the frame, and then when I find some details and lines that partner up and look good together, what I like to do is single those out so that I can accentuate those shapes and really find some fun details to work with. Now, in this waterfall specifically, we have a lot of boulders, too, that have kind of scattered along one of the sides that I'm gonna be playing with as well that I previously walked up and scouted out before I started shooting. So that's another pro tip, always walk around, find different areas that you can photograph and compositions that you can frame up, 'cause you don't just want to walk up to this scene and take it for what it is and then leave after you get that one shot. You want to try to maximize your time, especially at such a grand waterfall like we're at right now. So with a 110, with this, it's gonna be kind of more like a 70-millimeter about, I don't know the exact math on that, but roughly it's gonna give you that same kind of look that a 70-millimeter focal length would on something like a 70 to 200 lens. So I'm excited to get to some of these detail shots. Since we are at the base of these falls, it's a lot louder down here, and it's a lot closer to a lot of the mist that's coming off the falls itself, and a lot of those cascades just churn up a lot of water that can travel long distances in the air. My tip is, to keep your lens really clean and without any water droplets, is to either keep your lens cap on until the last second, or keep a microfiber cloth in your pocket and constantly wipe that off and then put your lens cap back on. Now, what I'm looking at here is some of the intricate details, because with this lower falls, it's kind of like a second waterfall within this, is that you get kind of in this converging shape before the last rock hits the lowest part of the water. I want that to come together, but then I also want the cascades in the back, the fiercest of the water, to really be blurred in the background and have that nice water motion. So I'm really looking to stack and compress a lot of these subjects together, because with these longer lens, the one 110, 70 to 200s, whatever you're using, those lenses create that compression between subjects. So, whereas the wide-angle lens, you had a lot of foreground elements that were scattered throughout the scene, with this, everything is gonna be right on top of each other, so what I like to do is find those little details and then put complimentary subjects within that, things that tell context of where you are, like the water and the background that's gonna be moving. So what I'm shooting at right now, if I turn this GFX 50S on that I got from MPB and this 110-millimeter, I'm at a two-second shutter speed. I'm actually at F22 and ISO 100. Let me just take the lens cap off to see if that works. That exposure looks right. It's exactly where I want it to be. The composition looks right, and I'm just gonna check the focus really quick. Exactly where I want it to be. So what I'm gonna do is take this shot and show you compression with subjects and complimentary subjects, one right on top of the other, and hit shutter. And there you go. This shot looks really good, because you do get those stacked compressed objects, but you get a lot of intricate texture and designs within the rocks, within the water, and then within the water in the very far back, that's kind of like that complimentary subject to the entire photograph itself. Now, intricate shots don't stop just here. I mean, since I'm already here, I can find several others within this scene that could be fun to play with too. So I could find a lot of different angles, I could find a lot of different boulders and cascades and where those meander around one another and converge. So always be looking within the waterfall itself of what your telephoto or those compressed shots can really look like before you leave the scene. Hey guys, I just want to thank you for watching this video on waterfall photography. I know that these tips, whenever you go out to your favorite local waterfall spot or travel to a waterfall and you find one in the wilderness, I know these tips are really gonna help you not only compose better shots, but also magnify the amount of photographs that you get in a single waterfall location. So thank you so much for watching. I can't wait to see you guys in the next video.