water like silk

One morning, I woke early and thought, “I should get out and photograph something.”  I remembered a stream I had recently discovered, so I grabbed my tripod and ran out to the spot.  Because the sun was still hidden behind the nearby hills, I was able to shoot everything with the same exposure...like it was all in the shade.  I proceeded to race around like little boy who just got a new bike for Christmas.  The fact that the light quality was great and that I brought my tripod (and filters like a polarizer and a new Graduated ND) really made this a lot easier than it should be.

How to: After finding a location, the biggest thing is that you need a good, solid tripod.  This is hard because usually this means really heavy or really expensive.  (Lets just say mine is not the lightest out there.)  Second: I used a Polorizer to cut out reflections on the water and on the green leaves so that things were of a more natural hue...and it drops the light levels a bit too so that I could have longer shutter speeds.  Finally, I tried out a new Graduated Neutral Density filter.  This is just a piece of glass that I hold in front of my lens, it has a darker area on the top and fades to clear on the bottom,  this makes the top of my frame darker than the bottom.  This really helped in images like the first and last ones, where the light values in the trees were brighter than those on the creak.