Revisiting My Happy Place

If you have been to this blog a few times you might recognize the place in the image below.  It is the spillway adjacent to a private lake in Bella Vista, AR.  I go there several times a year to photograph the water fall.  Every time I go, it is a different place.  Most of the time I will get an image similar to the one below and the primary difference will be how much water is flowing, based on recent rainfall.

 

As you can tell, there had been more rain fall prior to the image below.  The images were taken about two weeks apart. The image below was taken on August 19.

Back in May, we got a lot of rain and the falls looked like this.

When I took the image on August 19, I decided to get some images from an angle I had only done once before and there was much less water.  As the country comedian Jerry Clower used to say, "I got down amongst 'em."  Here are the results.

 I am no longer shooting from the bank, but I am actually in the stream bed. This is the area just above the falls in the previous images.  That water in the foreground is traveling to my left and forming the falls in the images above.  In the previous image above, I would be standing in about knee deep rapid flowing water.  Well, probably not standing.

If you move a little closer to these upper falls you get this image.

Behind that big boulder on the right in the one of the images above, you will find the primary source of the water flow.
The best time to photograph these images is early in the morning (within one hour of sunrise), or on an overcast day.  You need to be able to shoot with a shutter speed between 1 and 3 seconds in order to make the water silky, which means you must have a tripod and preferably a cable or remote shutter release.  If you have a DSLR camera, you set your ISO at 100 and your fstop as high as it will go (f16-f25).  Then you experiment with your shutter speed to get the look of the water.
I've got images of this water fall with almost no flow and I've got it frozen in the winter when temperatures were in the teens.  Like I said, every time I visit this place, it is different.  It is my photo happy place.  Find yourself a photo happy place and return to it often.  You'll discover just how photogenic it really is.
My plan is to enlarge a few of my images, frame them and hang them in the hallway of our home.  Have a blessed week-end.