Chasing Waterfalls with Yudschin

Monday I drove to Heutal in Austria once more for some hiking. Its a 1.5 hour drive and when I was on the road for about 1 hour I noticed that I forgot my boots - oh great. There's not much hiking in sandals, so I changed my plans and thought I'd make some photos of the brooks and waterfalls.

I began with a small brook that runs along the track towards the Hochalm, I noticed one particular spot in a previous visit, so I climbed down from the track and made some photos (Toni waited patiently). When I climbed back up to the track a hiker passed me by on his descend from the Sonntagshorn - I looked at him and I knew I've met him before, it was on the hike to the Aibleck.

I joined him on his descend to the Heutal (couldn't go much further with my sandals anyway) and we started chatting about this and that, hiking etc. and about photography at a certain point of course... turns out Eugen (thats his name) is a great waterfall chaser, he has collected wonderful and astonishing amounts of information of the waterfalls (which he ALL visited himself and photographed himself!) on his website.

We continued our walk and eventually ended at the Staubfall where we parted, he made the descend down to Germany, Laubau from where he started, I headed back up to the Heutal with Toni. At the Staubfall we passed through under the waterfall and climbed down a few meters on the opposite slope to make photos from a different viewing angle. This is one of them:


Staubfall Detail (FinePix S5Pro, 1/18s @ ISO 400; f/8, 165 mm DX)

This was a particularly interesting photo because the twig was moved by the wind of the falling water all the time. I had to find an exposure that would be long enough to blur the water but short enough to freeze the motion of that twig. At ISO100 and with the polarizer I could get nice and long exposures that blurred the water just fine, but the twig was also blurred.

The polarizer was a must to remove the reflections on the leaves, so was the aperture to get a good quality and sharpness, the only parameter left was the ISO - I carefully bumped it up and at ISO400 I got what I wanted - the photo you see above. Needless to say that it is one of my favorites from that session. :-)

A little bit of luck was involved too of course. It may not have been possible to reproduce the result at ISO400 again because the twig moved up and down differently all the time. :-)