Sunday, November 22, 2009

Rushing Water

Rushing water can be relaxing or scary, depending on whether you're listening to it, watching it or trying to navigate a raft through it. Since we were merely photographing it, the speed of the water didn't intimidate us.
Spring in Yellowstone this year was a little different than what we'd seen previously. They'd had a lot of snow the previous Winter and the melt was in progress, which made for rushing, dirty water. Normally, the water in Yellowstone is crystal clear, but dirt mixed with the water created off-white waterfalls in some areas.
How rushing water looks in a photograph depends on your shutter speed and aperature. I used a shutter speed of 200 and a 5.6 aperature in this particular picture. As you can see, that shutter speed was fast enough to freeze most of the motion of the water. If I had used a much slower shutter speed, the water would have looked silky. I'll post an example of that on a different day.

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