Capture Enchanting Waterscapes

This article was originally published in July 2014.

Photographing waterscapes does not really mean that you need to go to a seashore, river or pond. You can shoot a puddle on the road or even a fountain inside a park. You can even make interesting abstracts by capturing the shower at home! Be patient, observe the flow of water and the manner in which light hits it.

When shooting patterns in water, see if you can include a secondary element to enhance the frame. Photograph/Bijoy Jain.

Capture Movement
The most fascinating thing about water is that it is almost never still. The constant formation of ripples, splashes that occur when a pebble is thrown in or the manner in which the light bounces off flowing water are all phenomenon that you can use in your photographs. Zoom in completely to isolate the pattern. This will also ensure that there are no distracting elements in the frame.

Calm water always shows refl ections more clearly, which is a property you can use in your photos. Photograph/Sandeep Damre.

Play with Shutterspeed
If you want to make the water look like flowing lines of silk, you should use a slow shutterspeed like 1sec or 5sec. To do this, you will need to use a tripod and a Neutral Density filter, so that the overall frame does not get overexposed. Instead of using a fast shutterspeed to freeze moving water, you can also try using flash. The on-camera flash of your compact camera or DSLR is fired really quickly, at a speed of around 1/10000sec. This burst of light is quick enough to freeze almost any motion. So whether you are trying to capture water flowing from a tap or a photograph of your friends throwing water on each other, the use of flash can work really well.

While shooting water bodies, simplicity is of great essence. Try to see how you can utilise patterns in your frame. Photograph/Arnab Sarkar.

Combine Multiple Photos
While capturing reflections, you may come across a problem of the sky being a lot brighter or darker than the water. You can solve this issue by capturing many frames at different exposures and then blending them to create a High Dynamic Range (HDR) photo. Besides HDR images, you can also experiment with panoramas.