The Landing Pad

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Photography for me is often a bit like a jigsaw puzzle, in any given scene (no matter how crap it looks 🙂 ) there are a bunch of pieces ready to be assembled into some kind of coherent scene that is hopefully pleasing to the eye.

Now if were as simple as the average jigsaw puzzle where you can spread all the bits over the table and work out what goes where then it would be all too easy. Nature and scenes like this image mean you are constrained by where you can physically get to, where you can set your tripod up (without it falling and smashing everything 😉 – thats bad ) and finally the limitations on your gear, ie lens focal range etc.

There is one other point to make, unlike a jigsaw puzzle, real life scenes can have infinite number of solutions and consequently infinite final framings, I guess this is one of the driving factors for me and something which keeps me at photography, bit like golf 😉 . A whole bunch of people can go to the same spot with different gear and all come away with a different 'jigsaw' solution, some better than others (depending on your perspective).

This particular scene is buried down below Horseshoe Falls and is a great example, there is a bunch of really cool elements (rocks, falls, vegetation, ponds etc) which you can include in your scene/frame, but its how you assembly these items together which determines if the final image is alright and pleasing to the eye. I quite like this composition (at the moment anyway) and I took a long time moving around and adjusting the position slightly to get what I felt was the right combination of bits. I positioned the at big rock in front so that it dominated the scene (hence the landing pad title), the falls and flow of water down to the little pond in the foreground were positioned so it has that nice 'S' curve to lure the viewer up and flow thru the image, the little bit of brightness up the top was included to subtly pull the eyes up and away from the dominant rock in the foreground help them travel thru the image. The lines on the foreground rocks all lead in towards the centre of the image, again leaving that poor viewer with nothing but the option of getting drawn in 🙂

The image is created using three exposures, the over exposed and under exposed frames were only needed for a few small sections of the image (the top bright bit and the super dark areas (under the falls and rocks).

D750 coupled with Nikkor 16-35 mm f4 @ 16mm Aperture: f18 and Shutter Speed: 5s (normal exp) 1/1.6s (under exp) 30s (over exp)
ISO 100
Out front – Hoya CPL

Horseshoe Falls

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I have a image of the same falls from way back in 2013, but its taken from behind the waterfall, I would link it here, but google+ has just become craptastic and you cannot find your freakin' lunch let alone a post from a few years back. Flickr on the other hand makes it easy, so here's a link to it on there 🙂 https://flic.kr/p/eYyVAD

Anyway, the relatively minor amount of water coming over the falls meant that I could get right up close and personal with the falls, it was a bit of a challenge to capture the full dynamic range, even with the overcast day there was plenty of shadow under the ledge. This shot is a 4 shot panorama with each frame bracketed, the picture then manually blended to maintain the shadows.

4 shot (landscape orientation) panorama

D750 coupled with Nikkor 16-35 mm f4 @ 16mm Aperture: f14 and Shutter Speed: 13s (normal exp) 1.6s (under exp) 30s (over exp)
ISO 100
Out front – Hoya CPL & ND