Using Water Movement to Create Compelling Compositions

Hey, what's up guys, photographer David Johnston here, and I'm out at Great Smoky Mountains National Park shooting waterfall photographs, and I wanted to come out here and shoot a lot of the same waterfalls that I had been to in the past. But because we had a lot of heavy rain last night, it impacted the power of the water, and when you get heavier rain, and more powerful water, a lot of times it can create bubbles, or pockets, and circular patterns of the bubbles, because you have a heavier flow of water. Now, using this in compositions is really beneficial, because it allows you to use motion of the water to create more features in your photography. So what I'm doing with this photograph in particular, we have a circular pattern that's going on in the waterfall, it's just a small cascade, but since we have a deeper patch of water right below the waterfall, it's spinning that water, it's creating a whirlpool effect. I wanna lengthen my exposure, using a wide angle lens and a circular polarizer, to something like 2.5 to five seconds, to really track the circulation of that water. Now, if you have a darker exposure, it allows you to lengthen that a little bit more, but 2.5 to five seconds is gonna give you enough to capture that circulation in the water. So right now I'm shooting at 3.2 seconds, F16 and I have a ISO of 100 to reduce the amount of noise, and the darker parts of the image. I have a two second timer set up on my camera, just gonna hit go, and let's see how this one turns out. It looks pretty cool. I love coming to places like this. Places I've already been to, and knowing what the composition is like, but being able to add those interesting elements of rare weather events, like higher water pressure and higher water power, allows me to create some more interesting compositions in places I've already been to.