Print of the Week

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This photo was taken on our recent train trip around the United States, at Rockfish Creek just south of Charlottesville, Virginia. It was a pretty little creek with a few miniature waterfalls like this one. I love flowing water and reflections - I took a bunch of photographs here, but this is one of my favorites.

I've been posting some of my favorite photos on 500px and this one got the best response I've had so far. That surprised me a little since it's not particularly colorful and somewhat abstract.

I like the dark blues at the top, with the patch of warmer orange colors, balanced by the white foam at the bottom. I also liked the way the sun glinted off the falling water and made bright lines.

I slowed down the shutter as much as I could (by setting the ISO to the minimum of 80, and the aperture to f/32) which gave me a shutter speed of 1/15 of a second. It was a bright day so I would have needed a neutral density filter to go any slower, or to come back closer to sunrise or sunset. But 1/15 is about as slow as I can handhold anyway (no tripod as usual!) even with the camera's image stabilization. To be as stable as possible I was sitting with my elbows braced on my knees. The other trick is that I didn't include any static objects like rocks or trees since they would have shown up any shake more than the flowing water.

This was my first print on Epson Exhibition Fiber paper. I really like the results. It has nice deep blacks and good contrast. It's expensive paper, but no more so than buying lattes! I chopped up a 13x19 sheet into nine 4x6's to use for test prints. I use cheap glossy 4x6 paper at first, but to really judge the final result you need to use the same paper. I used a color profile I'd made myself with the ColorMunki and it seemed to match pretty well between screen and printer. I also used the soft proofing in Lightroom. Since I'm still getting used to the new printer and paper I just printed on 13x19. (I haven't used the 17x22 paper yet.)

See also: other print posts