Melville is a nice spot Chris, and now is a good time to go - after it rains, there's signifigantly more water flow on the falls, creating more chance for the nicely motion blurred shots. I'd say the later afternoon is a good time to go... just be careful working your way down to ther water... there's plenty of angeld moss covered rocks to slip on!
Vincent, your comments are always insightful amd offer PRACTICAL knowledge. Overall I would agree about the sky conditions. Oddly enough, there is a waterfall which feeds into the pond below seen here, that I will post some shots of later tonite.
Also, the first image uploaded is similiar to what you described about shooting directly into trees/forest. However there is a significant amount of sky showing, which is still somewhat distracting from the richer detail present in the trees and ground.
Aloha Chris! A nice, peaceful location on the east coast here. I used to fish a lot in places like this in the mountains of Virginia. This brings back memories. I like the reflections as well as the leaves floating in the water. The B&W conversion makes sense too.
The portion of this image that I am less fond of however, is the sky; it really detracts from the rest of the scene in my opinion. From all of my experience in photography, this kind of sky is my absolute least favorite for landscape shooting. Where this type of thick, overcast, bright sky seems to work best (and is actually essential) is for shooting any kind of waterfalls, floral close up images or "into the forest" kind of shots due to the even lighting and lack of shadows. But then again, one of the keys for those types of shots is to absolutely minimize how much of that cloud cover is in the scene itself. The extra bright, thick cloud cover like this is just not very photogenic from my experience. It just seems to take my attention away from the darker, more intersting, richer portions. In this case, with this setting, I would have tried to strictly focus on the lake and trees, omitting the sky, if possible altogether. In fact you could almost make this into a panoramic, or a bookmarker and see how much potential the lower portion offers here without the sky. This is also another reason why I try shooting all locations from many different angles, focal lengths and vantage points. I hope you do the same. Thanks for your comments on my images too by the way. This IS how we all learn and improve! A hui hou.
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{K:150877} 6/29/2006
