Shooting the Shooter Part Five - Moon Falls

It’s amazing what’s right around the corner that you don’t know about.  Ann was checking out waterfallsnorthwest.com and came across a set of three falls - Spirit, Moon and Pinard falls - not too far from here.  They’re so nice that we wound up checking them out over a series of weekends and we even went to one set of falls twice.  I say not too far, but that’s as the crow flies.  They’re still well over an hour away given that the short route takes logging roads most of the way and the long route goes down to Cottage Grove and back into the Cascades, but is paved until less than a mile away from Spirit Falls.

Today’s photograph is from Moon Falls.  It’s not of the falls because the lens on my camera isn’t wide enough for the falls, and you can’t really back up to get a good shot of it with my camera.  But what’s so nice about Moon Falls is that the creek just below the falls is braided with several different channels and interesting drops and pools.

This image was made on our second trip because I was lazy on the first trip and tried to hand hold most of my shots.  Well I learned my lesson about how unforgiving digital can be to hand holding at slow shutter speeds (I sure do miss the days of film) and don’t even try to push things if the shot is critical.  Lessons learned and I bought Ann her own tripod for Christmas so neither of us would have to do without.  I didn’t waste those images though, because I used them as scouting images so that on our second trip I knew exactly what images I wanted to make.  All I had to do was compose and then experiment with the movement of the water.

That last point, determining what the best shutter speed is for any given creek or set of falls, sounds a lot easier than it is.  On our hikes to Opal Creek last week we discussed this a lot.  We finally concluded that moving water has a fast shutter speed and a slow shutter speed where it looks “right.”  I guess you could say that there are three speeds - the minimum shutter speed that “freezes” splashes of water; the shutter speed that freezes most of the water but leaves some movement visible (and gives a sense of dynamics to the image); and a shutter speed that conveys a sense of “flow” and body to the water but doesn’t yet reach the point of just being a white blur.  The problem is, the time for each changes based on the speed of the water, the size of the water body and who knows what else.  For this shot, the last of the three options was 5 seconds.

I suspect we’ll return to this location again in the future, probably when its warmer so we won’t mind getting a bit wet to get to better locations.  It’s one of those locations where some of the more interesting photographs are not of the prime attraction.