Yosemite – A search for late summer water

“Yosemite Valley, to me, is always a sunrise, a glitter of green and golden wonder in a vast edifice of stone and space. – Ansel Adams

Not exactly an award winning shot, but I thought I would share it anyway. As I mentioned before in this VIDEO on my youtube channel, I had intended on capturing the grand waterfalls of Yosemite (as well as whatever I could find in my short visit there) and was looking forward to trying out a new piece of gear. Well, it was a good thing I stopped off at this little fall on the way (in fact, this might have actually been in a different park altogether!) Regardless, little did I know that this was about as much water as I was destined to see.

The variable ND filter I was messing around with enables you to slow the shutter speed down quite a bit….even in full sunlight….to be able to get those nice flowing water effects. In this image, I actually created an HDR or High Dynamic Range image for the base layer and then painted the water or most of the water in from another layer made up of one of the exposures that was about 1 second I believe.

Like I said, not an epic piece of art, but a cool demo of what can be done with this cool tool!