Award winning photographer, Satish Menon, selling fine-art prints and sharing photography insights with other photography enthusiasts.
Denali National Park, Alaska. Shot around 5PM (still midday for Alaska in July). The cloud cover helped me in getting this shot. A flat lighting landscape, somewhat saved by the meandering river that forms a great leading line. Nikon D4S with Nikkor 24-120mm f4 lens.
I went to Rainbow Falls in California’s Eastern Sierra over the July 4th weekend. My first visit to the falls was in the middle of the day, with my family. Since the sun was shining into the falls at that time of the day, it formed a rainbow at the base of the falls upon which it is named. From a photographer’s perspective, the light was too harsh and no good waterfall image could be produced at that time.
I came back the next day, early enough before sunrise, to get the light right for a waterfall image. While the grand view from the standard vista point was great, it did not offer anything satisfying for me. For example, one search for Rainbow Falls, CA in images.google.com, yields several images of the standard view. I began by making a standard view image as well. Here it is. It does not impress me and therefore it has not been published in my web gallery.
Rainbow Falls, CA. (Standard View from Vista Point)
After getting the standard shot out of the way, I started exercising my visual imagination to make additional more satisfying images. Using my 70-200mm f2.8 lens at 200mm, I made a frame that was later cropped to this 1:3 format. This is a section of the waterfall towards the right side of the view from the vista point. To me, this image is a compelling composition. It has a series of waters falling from the top right into the bottom one-thirds of the image, where there is a diagonal flow of water from the left to the right. There are distinct shapes and flows in the top, middle and bottom one-thirds of the image that grabs attention.
Rainbow Falls (section), CA, USA
Another shot using my 70-200mm f2.8 lens with 2x teleconverter (set at effective 400mm), is shown below.
Rainbow Falls (section), CA, USA
This one shows a single strand of waterfall to the right of the image counter-balancing the diagonal cascade going left to right.
Another 400mm shot is shown below.
Rainbow Falls (section), CA, USA
This one emphasizes the wall of water towards the right of the view from the vista point. The wall of water and its shapes/texture is counter balanced by the rocks at the bottom right.
As I wrapped up my shoot, I used the same 400mm setup to frame a couple of shots of the runoff from the falls.
Runoff from Rainbow Falls, CA.
This one showcases the whites from the falls runoff counterbalanced by the green grass on the shore. I saw this first and upon closer examination, I found a dead fallen tree bark whose branches pointed towards these whites. I thought that they formed a perfect set of complementary subjects to juxtapose in an image. Here it is.
Dead tree bark and whites from Rainbow Falls runoff, CA, USA
Notice how the shapes in the branches of the dead tree bark, mirrors the shapes of the whites (the branches pointing one way and the whites following it).
Using this post, I want to encourage more photographers to look beyond the obvious. The first thing that you see when you get to location should be photographed, but one should not stop there. The better photographs come from staying there, a bit longer, and looking for what else is there, or, how else the scene may be photographed. Changing viewpoints and changing lenses are the simple exercises to get you started on the road to eventually change what you see and see more.
When I come across something interesting to photograph, I do not click one image of an obvious composition and walk away. I start with the obvious compositions, but I keep refining and altering my position, until I have attempted a lot of variations. Very often, when I review my work later in Lightroom, I find that my later refinements bring out the fine keepers.
I photographed a waterfall along Fern Creek in Muir Woods, CA, last week. Let me illustrate how I worked the composition in that case.
The following image is the first image I made when I saw the waterfalls.
The first image made of the waterfalls
This first image has a number of branches coming in the way of the view of the falls. Clearly, I don’t like it and try another shot by moving a bit. The next image shown here removes a bunch of the blocks and the view is somewhat clear. However, one fern leaf snuck into the lower end of the image. It is important to understand that I was viewing through the viewfinder on my f2.8 lens, but I was shooting f22. This causes this fern leaf to be almost invisible in the viewfinder, due to shallow depth of field, but it shows up in the f22 image. Plus there is a brown twig in the lower left of the image. I see all this in my LCD panel and decide to try again.
The next image made
I moved and made the following image, in an attempt to remove distracting blocks to the view of the falls. The following image has problems though. Some other brown dried leaf has now snuck in, plus the brown twig on the left is still there.
The next image made
After some more adjustments to my tripod position, I made the following image. This composition is almost OK, but, during the 30 second long exposure, I got distracted talking to my kids in the nearby trail and accidentally touched/hit the tripod during the exposure. Observing the top edge of the rock, just after the falls, I realize that it is not exactly sharp, due to the accidental hit to the tripod during the exposure.
The next image made
I try again, this time getting a sharp image, with minimum distractions.
The next image made
Taking one of the final frames during these series, as my base, I decided to use Lightroom to crop it and develop further. FInally, I removed some branches and twigs to clean it up further. The final result is as shown below.
My final finished image
Many beginners ask me what I mean, when I say “work the composition more”. I decided to illustrate using this example.
Let me know if you have any feedback on this post.
When I first learnt about DSLR photography, I was told that the hardest lens to master how to use is the wide angle lens. I did not understand why. Now I know. A wide angle lens similar to my 17-35mm lens is one that makes the nearer objects much larger than our eyes see them, and the far off objects are smaller than what our eyes see them. As a result, even a slight shift in the camera position will result in major differences in the composition. Once you have found a suitable background for your image, small changes in the camera position will not impact the background much, but the objects that are very near the camera (the foreground), change massively in your image. If your landscape has a foreground, controlling it well is the key to good landscapes.
As soon as I got off my car during my lunch hour today, the top image is what I saw. I wanted to place the antique farm equipment as foreground, while placing the mustard field as my middle-ground and the distant trees/hills as the background. Before I even mounted my camera onto my tripod, I gauged the composition hand-held and once I felt satisfied with it, pulled out my tripod and adjusted it several times, until I was fully satisfied. In the end, I fired several bracketed exposures, that yielded the final HDR image shown at the bottom.
When you find a great middle-ground and background, spend time moving around to adjust your foreground, until you are very sure of your composition.
Image prior to adjusting position for foreground
Image after foreground positioning
