Sweet Creek Falls
As a photographer, I want to be unique and explore the hidden gems. I don’t want to look back on my gallery of images and only see the same shots every other photographer has. And while Angel’s Landing or Half Dome are on people’s bucket lists for good reason, I want to take the path less traveled and see places that few have.
Currently I live in Spokane, Washington, so many of the places I’ll be visiting will be near that city. The most recent adventure I had was to a short trail called Sweet Creek Falls. The hike is less than a mile and has a great payoff with two beautiful waterfalls. The only real downside to this location is you will have to drive nearly 90 minutes north of Spokane to reach it.
I’m a sucker for waterfalls. If you’ve never photographed one, here is a quick breakdown of my process. I prefer the long exposure effect of making the water’s motion turn to silk. To get that effect i use manual mode and then:
set your camera on a tripod to keep it steady
use a remote shutter or set it to a 2-second delay
attached a neutral density filter to your lens to control the light
set your ISO to automatic
place your exposure to somewhere between 1.5 seconds and 3 seconds
Those are the basics, and it’s not really very complicated. The true challenge is finding the most interesting composition. Do you have a shallow depth of field and focus on something interesting in the foreground or do you have a sharp background? Do you look for lines or the golden rule of thirds? I try to experiment and take a variety of approaches so see what looks best.
This time, I took a couple of shots with a shallow depth of field, getting the foreground in focus. I then took another shot with the waterfall sharp in the background to then composite the two together into one shot with two points of focus. I felt like this most closely simulates how our eyes naturally move from point to point, keeping everything in focus.
Right now, composition is what I’m working on improving. You could take a dozen photographers to the same spot and give them the same equipment and the results would be vastly different based on who can compose the most interesting photo.
