Tenaya Creek

This is Tenaya Creek in Yosemite. I was struck by the unusual water color repeated by the cedar stump. This shot represents an experiment with water texture. I had read that if you combine different exposures of flowing water with a fast, medium and slow shutter speed that it gave a more realistic look to water. Some folks (not me actually) do not like when flowing water shots become very soft and blurred. If that is you, you may want to combine multiple shots for a more ‘textured’ look to your water. For sure, the water in this shot looks very different from most other flowing water shots.

For this image, I used 5 shots with shutter speeds starting at 1 sec going as long as 3.2 seconds. Because none of my shutter speeds is fast enough to freeze water, I still have some blurred water effect. I used the Photomatix software to build a HDR but you could just combine the images as 5 layers in Photoshop each with 20% Opacity.