"" Writer's Wanderings: I Can Picture It In My Mind, Clark

Tuesday, December 01, 2015

I Can Picture It In My Mind, Clark

Photographs are a natural part of travel. Or are they?

We love to take photos so that we have a record of where we've been and what we've done. It helps to settle arguments sometimes when one or the other of us can't remember something or some place. While I enjoy composing pictures and trying to capture moments, I'm not so much a fan of aperture settings, f-stops, and ISO. My crutch is the auto feature on my camera but it doesn't always work the way I want it to. Case in point: waterfalls.

The last trip we took out west had us visiting lots of waterfalls but it seemed that every picture I took had a sheet of white water, not the textured look of water falling over rocks. I tried using the sport setting on my camera thinking that perhaps since water falling was action the camera would adjust better. In some cases it seemed to work but I still wasn't satisfied.

Of course I turned to the internet. After all, I'm hoping for lots more waterfalls in my future. I found several sites that told me all about ISO, aperture, and f-stop when taking waterfall pictures but nothing that was definitive. There is no one-size-fits-all. The bottom line was to experiment because all situations are not created equal. What do I mean?

Light changes throughout the day and is affected by weather and location. The best advice I got here was to take your shots early in the morning or later in the afternoon/evening. That's great advice if you are a professional and are ready to fix your schedule around your shooting. A traveler aims, shoots and moves on. There's lots more to see.

I'm whining, I know. But I wanted an easy fix. So here's my conclusion. I'll carry the recommended tripod only when I'm not hiking more than a few feet to view the waterfall. The jury is still out on the filters that were suggested. Some recommended them. Some didn't. What I can take from all of the searching is that I need to put the camera in a manual mode and shoot a couple dozen pictures with different settings. That's how I've gotten some good night shots so I will apply it to waterfalls as well.

I want to enjoy our travel and not be tied to the camera all the time. After all, some of those memories ought to just be pictured in my mind.

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