PotW #2! Water

For this week's Picture of the week theme, I selected water.  I love playing with pictures of water, because water is such a dynamic subject. You can take a fast picture and capture a moment of violence in perfect clarity, with drops suspended in the air, or you can take a long exposure (or several) to give a scene a dreamy quality, with the rushing water quieted into a dreamy blanket of probability. A calm body of water can be like a mirror for the scene beyond, showing you an upside-down world, sometimes blurring the lines between water and sky, or you can polarize the incoming light just right, and look straight through a clear body of water to the bottom.
With so many options available to me, I had difficulty deciding which shot I should look for, but time told me what would work best. The best calm shots I could think of locally would really look best as a sunset shoot, for the extra punch of color. Especially with the winter causing most of the landscape to be a dull color, some fire in the sky would go a long way.

I haven't found somewhere where a shot through to the bottom really piqued my interest yet, though I do keep checking. I'll be sure to put one up if I come across something really amazing. Also, the power of water frozen in a moment really needs to be a picture of some really awesome water, so I elected to shoot the dreamy shot with water flowing over some rocks.

Flowing Water

The smallest available aperture on my lenses, and the light at the time of this shoot meant that to really get the amount of time I wanted to elapse in the picture took shooting multiple of the same shot.

My trusty tripod, and a remote shooting release (a wired one) allowed me to set up the shot, then take several seconds of exposure (spread out on multiple images) all of the exact same framed shot.

There are 3 very slow images, and a faster image which is masked based on it's own brightness to give the sky a chance to shine at a reasonable exposure for the sky in this image.  It's an HDR blending trick I've picked up that gets me to a great baseline before I do my final blending adjustments. The only way this could have been more dreamy looking, I think, is if I had used my diffusion filter for the shoot too.  But there's something I really like about the clarity of the rocks juxtaposed with the water around them that would be lost if everything was hit with some diffusion.

What are your favorite photographic techniques for water as a subject? Share your thoughts, or your pictures in the comments below, and view a gallery of all (2 so far) of the PotW images here, at worrestphotography.com/potw.