How to photograph waterfalls

Whether you’re passionate about photography or just starting out, there’s a good chance you’re interested in nature or landscape photography. For me, it’s one of the nicest ways to practice photography while discovering beautiful places. In this article, we’ll look at photographing waterfalls: how to approach the scene, how to shoot, frame and compose your image, what gear to use, what you need to know, and more.

We all have those beautiful waterfall photos in mind, with silky-smooth water that still feels full of movement, and you’re probably wondering how to get the same result in your own photos. Here are my 5 tips for a successful waterfall photo.

You might think you can photograph waterfalls at any time of day. And yes, technically you can, but depending on the surrounding light, your photo can quickly look flat, pale, and low in contrast. The idea is to choose the right day, and especially the right time of day, for your shot.

If you try to photograph waterfalls in the middle of the day in full sunlight, for example, you’ll run into several problems: the sky may be too bright, the moving water may also become too bright or even “blown out,” as photographers say, and your camera may struggle to balance the exposure across the different parts of the scene. In short, it’s usually not ideal.

Instead, try to focus on days when the light is softer, such as cloudy days. The difference in brightness between the different planes of the image will be less extreme, and your photo will usually be better balanced.

As a general rule, the hours just after sunrise and just before sunset, the famous “golden hours,” are ideal for getting soft, colorful light. The ambient light is lower, which also makes the shot easier to manage.

Examples of waterfall photos in the undergrowth (left) and during the golden hours (right)

If you want to take a nice waterfall photo, I’d give priority to wooded areas with vegetation you can include in the foreground or background. You can also use a polarizing filter to bring out the greens in the scene and reduce reflections on water and leaves. We’ll come back to this at the end of the article.

One essential point: try to avoid windy days as much as possible. Otherwise, some of the foliage may blur during a long exposure.

One last tip: if you’ve found a good spot not too far from home, try visiting it at different times of day to see where the sun falls and how much light you can expect on the waterfall. Depending on the time of day and the type of photo you want to take, a long exposure for example, you may need additional photography gear, such as lens filters, a tripod, and so on.

This is a slightly tricky point because it comes down partly to personal taste and also depends a lot on the time of day. Let me explain. When you decide to photograph a waterfall, there are several ways to approach it:

Either you don’t have any specific gear with you and simply want to capture the place as it is. In that case, you’ll shoot handheld, and your shutter speed will probably be too fast to create that smooth, blurred effect in the water. Most of the time, you’ll freeze the waterfall, which in my opinion is not especially aesthetic and doesn’t really reflect the movement of the scene,

To get a more realistic sense of motion, so to speak, you’ll need to use a slower shutter speed. You can still manage without a tripod as long as you stay within acceptable handheld shutter speeds. A good range here is between 1/40 and 1/100. With this exposure time, you’ll get a slight silky effect on the waterfall and the flowing water,

Finally, to get that “ghostly” effect in the moving water, the kind of beautiful images you see in reports, you’ll need an even slower shutter speed, very often below 1/10s. This is a specific photographic technique called long-exposure photography. The idea is simply to create a more stylized effect by capturing the scene over a longer period of time. This does require a tripod.

With this technique, two points are important to keep in mind:

• The amount of blur you want: You can choose to create a light blur effect with a shutter speed between 1/10 and 1s, which is already more than enough to achieve this result. On large waterfalls with a very strong flow, longer exposure times can be interesting to create a misty effect at the foot of the waterfall and give the scene a more mysterious feel. The more water, flow, and visual details you have there, such as rocks or vegetation, the more pronounced this effect will be,

• The time of day and the location where you take the photo: This is a key point because, depending on the time of day, you may or may not need lens filters to reduce the brightness of the scene. To keep it simple, in the middle of the day and in sunlight, the scene will often be too bright to get a silky effect on a waterfall. You’ll have no choice but to use an ND filter, or neutral density filter. In the undergrowth, this will be less of an issue because the ambient light is softer. Your camera will naturally display a slower shutter speed. In the evening or morning, the light will also be very soft, and you won’t necessarily need a filter to create a sense of motion. Want to learn more about how to take a long exposure in photography?

Another very important point when photographing waterfalls is the exposure of the scene. You might say, just like in any photo, right? In reality, the specific challenge with waterfall photography is that, as in landscape photography, you may sometimes have a dark foreground, such as rocks, ground, or soil, and a brighter background, usually the sky. On top of that, you also have to manage overexposure in the water, especially the white parts where the water is moving.

Even with a high-end camera, it can be difficult to get the exposure right in a very contrasty scene. You’ll usually have fewer problems in the undergrowth, where the light across the scene should be more even. Here are a few tips for getting the exposure right.

As a general rule, pay close attention to the moving water, which is the brighter part of the scene. The idea is to expose to the right, as photographers say. What does that mean in practice? For each photo, you have a small histogram that shows the balance between highlights and shadows. The highlights, on the right side of the histogram, should be your priority, while still avoiding underexposed shadows in the scene. Otherwise, you’ll have to do a lot of post-processing work on the computer and may often see noise appear in those darker areas, which is not very pretty. In some cases, you may need to use exposure compensation. We’ll come back to that later.

To manage your exposure properly when there is sky in the frame, you can use a graduated neutral density filter, or GND filter, which is darker on the upper part of the filter. You place it over the sky, the brighter area, to control the exposure of your image. In practice, it helps your camera expose the scene correctly at the time of shooting, instead of adding a graduated filter later in Lightroom or Photoshop.

I think this is a crucial point in many areas of photography, including waterfall photography. I could, and probably will, write a full article on each of the detailed points below:

• Pay attention to your foreground: most of the time, you’ll have a foreground in a waterfall photo. Look for a detail or a specific element that catches the eye: a stone, a root, a tree trunk, and so on. Highlight it by using the rule of thirds or the golden ratio to draw the viewer’s eye to that point. I’ll cover these ideas in more detail in dedicated articles. Another option is to “bring the waterfall” toward the viewer’s eye, in other words, to make it feel as if the waterfall is flowing toward you,

• Watch your background as well: you’ll need to pay special attention to your background, especially if it includes the sky. You really want to avoid a blown-out sky at all costs. In the undergrowth, try to arrange the trees and foliage in the background as carefully as possible,

• Look for an unusual point of view: most people will probably take the photo standing up with their tripod. Try moving around the scene in front of you, stepping back, getting higher, shifting to the right or left, or even putting your feet in the water. Basically, look for something a little different. One viewpoint that can really change the image is getting down to water level with your tripod and placing a key element on a strong point in the frame,

• Use horizontal and vertical lines: we’ll talk about this in detail in another article, but the idea is to use any visible element around you to guide the viewer’s eye through the image. With waterfalls in the undergrowth, this might be a tree trunk entering the water, a dead branch leading toward a specific point, flattened reeds, cracks in the ground, and so on. You may also notice a U-shape, a C-shape, or simply a curve that leads the eye toward the waterfall. This will bring more dynamism to your image,

• Watch out for distracting elements: What do I mean by that? When you photograph a waterfall, you’re often so focused on the waterfall itself that you don’t notice what’s around it. You only realize afterward, and it still happens to me today, that certain elements in the scene distract from the photo and pull your eye away. I recently took a quick shot of a waterfall, without a tripod and with the camera placed on a rock, and only later realized that a tall blade of grass ended up on one edge of the waterfall. Yes, it’s not the end of the world, and if you don’t have a photographer’s eye, you may never notice it, but the photo would definitely have been better without it. Of course, you can still remove this small mistake in post-production.

Last but not least, the final essential point in this article is the camera gear you’ll use, or should use, for your waterfall photos. We’re talking about photography accessories here, and I invite you to take a look at the “camera accessories” category of the blog for more information on lens filters, tripods, and help choosing and using them.

• A tripod: this is the essential piece of gear and the first thing you should invest in for this type of photography. You’ll also use it very often for classic landscape photography as soon as the light drops, early in the morning or late in the evening. The same goes for shooting long exposures by the sea. I am finalizing an article on how to choose a tripod. There are all kinds of prices, and everything will depend on your budget, the weight of your camera gear, and what you want to shoot. You can click this link for quality tripods at affordable prices, approximately between €150 and €300. Otherwise, you can try to get by by placing your DSLR on the ground or on a rock and taking the shot, but the result often won’t be quite there… let’s just say a tripod definitely helps!

• Lens filters: I talk about them a lot in the “camera accessories” category of the blog, and for waterfall photography, I think they are almost essential. A polarizing filter is useful for enhancing and saturating colors, reducing reflections on water and leaves, and allowing you, for example, to see the bottom of a river. All those photos you see of waterfalls, lakes, or coastlines where the bottom is perfectly visible are taken with a polarizing filter at the time of shooting. And no, for those wondering, you can’t remove water reflections on a computer in post-processing. Below are two essential items for waterfall photography: an ND filter and a tripod.

The ND filter, or neutral density filter, will be necessary when the light is too strong and your camera’s optimal settings don’t allow you to get a silky effect. Even when the light is low, an ND filter can be used to lengthen the exposure time and give the scene an even more misty, mysterious feel. The choice of filter density will, of course, depend on the situation. Using an ND filter for this type of photo also requires a tripod…

Finally, the GND filter, or graduated neutral density filter, is probably the least useful filter for waterfall photography, but it can help if you have a real sky in the background. Since the sky is often brighter than the rest of the scene, using a GND filter, which is darker at the top, allows you to balance the exposure of your photo when shooting.

Here is a set of GND, ND, and polarizing filters, along with the matching filter holder, that I can recommend without hesitation.

• A remote control: if you’re going to use a tripod, buying a remote control is also very useful. It won’t break the bank, and there are simple models starting at around €15 that work very well. Again, it’s fine if you don’t have one at first, and you can always use the 10-second timer on your camera. But for the price, it would be a shame to go without one, wouldn’t it?

• Something to cut grass: it might make you smile, but I can’t count the number of times I’ve found myself cutting grass or branches by hand because they were getting in the way… Even in landscape photography, again recently during my road trip in the USA, I had to cut several low grasses that were distracting from the composition I wanted.

If you travel a lot, I invite you to read my 10 tips for taking great travel pictures. I hope you now have a clearer idea of how to photograph waterfalls. Personally, my photos became much better once I started following these tips. You now have everything you need to capture more beautiful images.

Written by Sylvain PONS

I've been passionate about photography since 2010, learning as I went along. Today, I dedicate myself to guiding others in their choice of camera gear and sharing a variety of tips to improve their photography skills.

Despite our care, a mistake may have slipped into this article. If you find any, please don't hesitate to let us know so we can correct it as soon as possible and keep our information up-to-date!