City - Wentworth Falls State - NSW Country - Australia
About
I encountered this small waterfall on an early morning hike in Austalia's Blue Mountains. I've done very little B/W photography and would appreciate suggestions for improvement.
I haven't been to Wentworth falls... yet... It's very difficult to photograph places like this i Aus. as the lighting is usually incredibly contrasty. Having worked with film for many years the only way round this was to twiddle exposure and development times - and choose cloudy days to work! Digitally, life is a bit easier, but no picnic when the lighting is really contrasty. I notice you've gone to grayscale. If the capture was in colour, making it grayscale is an easy option in your editing software, but there are more rewarding ways to go. Great control can be achieved by leaving your image as an RGB file, going to the channel mixer, selecting monochrome (not greyscale) and then using the red, green and blue sliders to adjust the image. It allows you to produce effects very much like using filters with B&W film. Remember how a red filter made a blue sky really dark? Green filters made vegetation lighter? Experiment - it's fun! Make sure that the sum of values for RGB channels stay at 100 if the image is correctly exposed, and be very careful using the blue channel- it can have some disturbing results. I'm no expert, just enjoy playing. I only bought my first digital camera about a month ago (a really basic 2mp effort to see whether I liked it whole digital scene - I'm hooked and am looking around for a better camera.) Hope this helps. Ed
Humm, I just posted a pic of Fallingwater too, but mine looks a bit different for some reason :P
Great shot. That looks like an amazing place to see in person. For some reason, I don't think a picture could be taken to get the same feeling as actually being in a place like that. I think a slightly longer shutter time would have made a nice effect on the water.