We’ve arrived to the section of river which really is in full speed. The water’s really gushing, zigzagging down through these rocks, looks really, really good. Now I’ve identified what I hope will be a nice bit of foreground interest in the form of this light and covered rock. Although we’re here twice to photograph landscape, there is actually plenty of wildlife around at the moment; this is July in the highlands of Scotland, and a nice still clammy humid day, so there are actually clouds of midges around at the moment, everybody’s friend. Before we go out into the river because what you’re going to have to do that to secure the shot, there’s some obvious precautions to take. One of which is that the camera is very securely attached to the tripod, I’ve got my spirit level attached to the hot shoe here to make sure the shot is level, and we’re working on an even ground; and we’re also using a polarizing filter which will help to take the glare off the surface of the water, it actually slows the shutter speed and give the water that lovely milky effect, and again, making sure that the polarizing is well attached to the lens before we go out. Okay, we’ll go out into the water and see what we can get.
The essential thing here is to get this foreground rock in just the right place, so the tripod’s going to have to go into the water, there’s no way of getting around now, but as long as it’s nice and sturdy and wedged in, that’s fine. I guess I just need to bring the tripod up to weave it, just to get it leveled, midges, oh, okay. So we’re framing it in such a way that the water is cascading down around this rock, I’m going to turn the polarizer until that water turns a really nice peaty brown color and that takes the glare off the water completely. Now setting an aperture of f20, so that could be old, it’s good, it’s going to be shot from front to back, and because we’ve got such a small aperture, we’re going to have a shutter speed of something like just on the 2 second, which is going to render this water a nice, give it a nice silky effect as it close to water, so just check spirit level, try camera’s level, composition’s in place, refocus, I’ve actually got the camera release set on 2 second timer, so I’m going to press the shutter and then stand back and wait for the shutter to be released. Check the histogram, yeah that looks fine, do a little bit of that insane shot again, just a little bit of rocketing, just going to increase the shutter speed by 2/3rd of a stop, that maybe just over 2 seconds, hands off, camera’s completely steady, shot’s in the bag, ah, midges. Okay, done.
By using pretty simple techniques to be on this like polarizing filter and by slowing the shutter speed down, we can still get very strong images from what is effectively a very simple subject. Okay, so that’s it. One last scratch, oh, and we’re going home.
We’re back inside now, safe from the midges, and the image you see in front of you is my favorite from the shoot. I like it and we used to remember the large boulder in the foreground to lead us into the picture, it’s not classic by any means, and what I don’t like about it on reflection is the amount of the water, the dominance of the river over the rest of the habitat. So I’m going to show you one done from the same location, slightly different time of year but very, very similar conditions; and as you can see from this picture, the river is an integral part of the over-all landscape, there’s much more information about the forest, the ground vegetation, much more atmosphere, much more depth. So of the two, I prefer this one. It just goes to show that in seemingly adverse conditions when it’s very easy just to stay at home, creative images can still be made.