I have struggled with taking photos outside of golden hour but have always enjoyed the play of light on the water and I like the way the sun reflections create abstract patterns. I shot at f2.8 hoping to be able to have some part of the water be recognizable but I wanted the background to blur. The water and wave offer a significant challenge because they are never the same twice. You have to pick a spot and Hope a nice combination comes along.
Specific Feedback Requested
Is this an interesting idea? How does the composition work? I like the large bokeh sun reflections, but would smaller more focused ones maybe work better? Does it look at all intentional or just like I took a blurry snapshot?
Technical Details
17mm 1/1250sec f2.8 ISO 100 post processing in Lightroom.
Hi Cameron,
I know exactly what you mean about wanting to capture the way light plays and reflects on water! Unfortunately I don’t think this particular attempt quite works, but I do like that you’re recognizing something interesting to you personally and trying to work with it creatively.
I think maybe f/2.8 is too shallow here, but that is no rule of thumb - it all depends on your distance from the water, how much of an angle you are pointing at relative to the plane of the water’s surface, and your focal length.
I think the main thing here is that you need to have some element to latch onto, and even the “in focus” highlights here still feel a bit out of focus and scattered, not intentional or evenly-distributed enough to avoid the snapshot look, as you mentioned. They’re also sandwiched between lots of bright/out of focus highlights and the somewhat featureless (by comparison) orange creek bottom, so they don’t really stand out.
Shooting water in this way is a difficult endeavor, as there is always an element outside of your control - as you said, you just have to pick a spot and hope a nice arrangement comes along. However, you can choose the particular section of water, the framing, the depth of field, and your perspective. Don’t be discouraged - I take hundreds or thousands of water exposures every year, and usually only a small handful make it into my portfolio. It is a subject with a pretty low success rate.
You asked if this is an interesting idea, and I think it absolutely is. I just think you need to experiment more until you find something that works - change your perspective, focus in different areas and try different apertures, find different kinds and amounts of water movement, try different sections of water with varying “backdrops” (the bottom of the creek/river), experiment with direct specular reflections of light versus reflected lit-up subjects, etc.
Thanks Alex. That was some excellent feedback. I think I will keep working with it. I enjoy the uncertainty of what the waves throw at you. I also like that it’s something to experiment with during the middle of the day when I’m usually not quite as interested in the light. Maybe I’ll throw another one of these up here if one turns out better.
