Last weekend I ventured out into one of the national parks near to my home. There’s a well known set of waterfalls at this location, so I thought I’d have a play around with the camera in manual mode. It was late in the afternoon – and it’s winter here in Australia, so the sun is quite low in the sky and was catching just the top of the trees above the falls. I was positioned below the falls, where it was quite dark in comparison to tops of the trees.
I took a number of shots with different shutter speeds and aperture settings, and as expected, the resulting photos were quite mixed and varied. I did have one surprise in that I didn’t blur any of the photos taken at this particular location. I wasn’t so lucky in other parts of the park…
Some of the photos here were taken with a shutter speed of 1/60 second which is the slowest I would normally use without a tripod – I don’t have a steady hand 
Due to my inexperience, most of the shots are saturated (overexposed) at the top. Even though the foot of the falls looked quite dark, there was quite a lot of ambient light bouncing around from the direct sunlight hitting the tops of the trees, and the results say as much. I think a slightly faster shutter speed would have helped me here.
So, what am I talking about? Here are some samples.
The two horizontal shots below are the bookends of the series – the most and least exposed. Even the least exposed is a little over cooked though.
And these two vertical shots have a much better balance, but still aren’t quite right…
Well, that’s it for today. These are only 4 shots from a 24 exp film. I’ll write some more about some of the other photos in the coming days.
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