HOW TO SHOOT WATERFALLS

Waterfalls are a very beautiful subject to photo- graph,but you have to be patient to do that.You have to try over and over again so you probably should stay in that place for a long time or you should return in the same place several times.
Practice can make perfect!This will help you compose your shoots in different ways so you later can choose which is the best picture.
Lighting:The best lighting for shooting waterfalls is overcast,but you can have good results even if the water is in the shade.It allows for the longer exposure times without blowing out the highlights.You should not photograph waterfalls on a sunny day.Sunny days in the forest may be nice for close-up studies, but adding sun to a waterfall landscape is not a good idea , the range of light and dark is so extreme that your compositions will be washed out or hidden in blackness.

Shutter Speed: In order to get that blurred-smooth-flow look to your waterfall scene, you need to shoot at a shutter speed of 1 to 1.6 seconds.The longer the shutter speed the smother the surfice will be and the prettier the picture. In order to achieve a properly exposed scene at those slow shutter speeds, you’ll need to set your aperture to a setting of f/16 or smaller, up to f/22. You’ll get great depth of field, with the entire frame in focus too. If the lighting is too bright to bring your shutter speed down to 1 to 1.6 seconds, try a neutral density filter.You should never use the auto-setting of apeture and shutter speed.Metering is something that cameras generally do very well. They begin to fail, however, when you start to introduce very white or very black subjects in an image. The reason for this is because humans see in 16-stops, whereas cameras "see" no more than 5-stops. This means that images with high contrast are not correctly exposed when left to the camera's automatic settings , if you have a lot of white in your subject of focus, the camera tends to make it grey in the final image, and correspondingly underexposes the rest of the image. Similarly, if you have a lot of black in your image, the camera tends to make the black turn out grey in the final image, thus overexposing the rest of the image.

ND Filter: A neutral density (ND) filter is a must for waterfall shooting. Placing an ND filter over your lens reduces the amount of light, thus decreasing the shutter speeds to accommodate the reduction of light, without affecting color in your scene.Often is made a mistake by not using a polarising filter.In a nutshell, polarizing filters cut the glare. Wet surfaces tend to reflect the sky colour, so you'll actually need the polarizing filter more for rainy days where the sky colour is grey than for sunny days. But we've already agreed you shouldn't photography waterfalls on sunny days Removing glare from an image allows you to see the colourful world underneath the glare, and no amount of Photoshopping after your shoot will fix it..

Tripod and Remote Shutter Release: At shutter speeds of 1 to 1.6 seconds, use of a tripod, a good tripod is a must.With those speeds, you’ll also need to use a remote shutter release. Using a remote shutter release eliminates any vibration introduced to your camera from your hand when your finger actually presses the shutter.A remote release is available for almost all camera models and it makes a huge difference in obtaining sharp images. If you don't have one you should use your camera's self timer.

Self-Timer: Using your cameras self-timer feature will accomplish the same effect as using a remote shutter release. When this feature is set, you press the shutter, and the camera doesn’t expose your film or image sensor for a pre-set number of seconds. Setting your self timer to 5 seconds will allow for any vibrations to cease when pressing the shutter button.