Landscape Ideas for Rivers, Waterfalls & Lakes

Here's an article from what is quickly becoming a favorite website of mine, Digital Camera World. The suggestions are so appropriate for our class and the photos are great.

Landscape photography ideas for rivers, waterfalls and lakes.

jmeyer | Landscape | Photography Tips | 01/10/2012 02:00am

From shooting at sunrise or sunset, to the rule of thirds, there are loads of unwritten rules about what makes 
good landscape photography. There’s nothing wrong with following the basic rules of photography, but it’s all too easy to get stuck in a rut, producing the same old style over and over again – a single boulder in the foreground and blurry water in front of a sunset, for example.

So we’ve come up with a range of landscape photography tips techniques that you can use to breathe new life into your pictures. Each week this month we’ll bring you fresh advice on getting original shots in classic landscape locations, from lowlands and woodlands to mountains and beaches, but many of the photography techniques will be useful wherever, and whenever, you choose to shoot.

Don’t be afraid to try something new – you never know, you might even come up with your own twist 
on the techniques revealed here and go on to transform your shots.

Photo Ideas for rivers, waterfalls and lakes

From a flat, calm lake to a surging waterfall, water can dramatically change the character of your landscape images. Here are four ways to capture its different moods.

Shallow depth of field
Keeping as much of your shot in focus from front to back by using a wide-angle lens and small aperture (such as f/16) isn’t the only approach you can take when you’re shooting landscapes. Why not tryusing shallow depth of field to give your shots a completely different look?

This approach works best if you have a subject such as a flower, rock or tree in the foreground, because this gives the image a focal point.

You need to choose a wide aperture such as f/4, and focus on a subject as close to the camera as possible for the most dramatic effect.

The thing to remember here is the greater the distance between the foreground subject and the background, the more out of focus the background will be.

Shoot landscapes at water level

We’re all used to seeing landscape photography from normal eye-level, so something as simple as switching to a low or high shooting position can transform the images you take. When taking pictures of water, try to get as close to water 
level as possible – as well as giving a different perspective on the scene; this will also help to enhance any reflections on the surface of the water.

Shoot below the water
You can go a step further and get below the water for a different view of the landscape. Rather than going completely under the surface, positioning the camera so that you see beneath the surface of the water as well as the landscape above it gives a dramatic and unusual view.

Water and expensive cameras don’t really mix, though, so you’ll need a way of waterproofing your kit before you start submerging it (see panel, right). Rather than one of the expensive underwater housings, we used a cheap fish tank for our shots.

Although it does take a bit of nerve to place the tank in the water with your camera inside it, as long as you test it for leaks first it’s pretty safe.

We also attached a two-stop graduated Neutral Density filter to give a more balanced exposure between the water and the land.

With the camera in Manual exposure mode, we set the exposure before putting the camera inside the tank, and attached a remote control to make it easier to fire the camera.

This set-up is only suitable for fairly calm water, not the sea, as the top of the tank is open to the elements. Any waves will also make it virtually impossible to keep the surface of the water level, and the water on the face of the tank in front of the lens will be visible on the above-water area of your shot.

3 ways to shoot underwater with your DSLR 

Budget: 
£15 to £50
Fish tank (local pet shop)
OK, so you may feel a bit of a fool carrying a fish tank around, but it’s a good solution for this technique. The square sides of the tank make it easier to hold level than the dedicated camera housings or cases, and you can still use ND grad filters to balance the exposure between the areas above and below the water. Just make sure you test the tank to make sure it’s watertight before submerging your expensive camera kit!

2 Mid-range 
£60 to £200
Underwater case, such as one from ewa-marine or DiCAPac
These soft plastic cases are much cheaper than the solid casings, and for this technique the fact that they are only waterproof down to around five metres isn’t an issue. As with the hard housings, you can’t use filters, but they’re great if you want to take your camera into really wet locations such as under waterfalls – or even if you want to shoot in the rain.

3 Money no object 
£1,000 plus
Underwater housing, such as one from Sea & Sea or Ikelite
Designed for taking cameras deep underwater, these solid casings are available for specific models of camera and often still give access to the main controls. But they’re extremely expensive, and you can’t use filters. So, while they give the greatest peace of mind, they’re a bit of an extreme solution.

Make upright panoramas 

We’re all used to seeing horizontal ‘letterbox’ panoramic shots, but rivers and waterfalls often don’t fit this format.

However, if the river or waterfall is on a slope, it will work perfectly as an upright panorama.

The simplest way to get a shot like this is to shoot in an upright format and then crop your image into the panoramic shape.

But if you want to produce very large prints you can get a much higher-resolution file by shooting a series of horizontal images and stitching them together into a panoramic format using the Photomerge feature in Photoshop CS or Photoshop Elements.

If you’re stitching images that feature moving water, you’ll need to do some manual cloning to hide the joins, as the software will struggle to match the different images.