A few weeks ago, we stayed with my wife’s sister in a small town in eastern Idaho called Victor near the Grand Tetons. While we were there, we visited the Upper and Lower Mesa Falls and Cave Falls inside Yellowstone National Park. We were there during the middle of the day, which is probably the worst time to shoot a waterfall because the amount of light needs to be really small to keep the shutter open long enough to capture the motion of the water.
I used a special filter called an ND2 (neutral density) filter. This is like putting a pair of sunglasses on your camera, and set up the camera so that it would limit the amount of light getting inside by using the smallest aperture the lens would allow and setting the ISO to the lowest number the camera will go. For my Nikon D50 and 28-80mm lens, the smallest aperture is f/32 and the ISO is 200. I also used a tripod to make sure the camera didn’t shake while the shutter was open.
One thing I learned is that the white water tricks the camera into thinking it’s getting overexposed even though it’s not, so I could have increased the shutter time even further. I’d also like to try shooting these (or other falls) either at dawn or dusk, or during a dark cloudy day because the camera’s shutter could be open far longer than it was.
At any rate, I believe these pictures turned out reasonably well: (click on the pictures for larger versions):
Even though I plan to continue to shoot waterfalls wherever and whenever I can, this fulfills one of my goals to take a slow motion picture of a huge waterfall.