Photographing water: Long exposure photography techniques with travel photographer Dave Morrow

 

 

Travel and nature photographer Dave Morrow has an excellent ongoing video series, "Landscape Photography Journals." We have shared and featured some of the previous episodes in the series and you can see all the videos via the link above. His latest episode is all about long exposure water photography, specifically aimed at photographing rivers and streams but also oceans.

When photographing moving water, balancing your exposure can be very tricky. The white areas of the water are often much brighter than the rest of the scene, particularly when there are shadows in the area. This is part of the reason, along with white balance flexibility, why it's so important to photograph using RAW files. Using live view or evaluating the histogram in your camera -- which is a histogram of a JPEG file, so it's imperfect -- you can see if you are clipping your highlights while still pushing the exposure as far to the right of your histogram as possible. To see more tips and tricks for photographing long exposure shots of water, check out Morrow's video below.

(Via Dave Morrow)