I think we'll move upstream for the next day or two until reaching Minnehaha Falls.

As mentioned previously, I was out at the falls yesterday with a couple of other photographers.  Since I had stopped to capture a couple of images of the falls themselves (tomorrow's image), they continued downstream a bit.  I caught up to them at bridge, shooting it from the other side.  I checked it for myself, but there was some graffiti I found distracting, plus the foreground was uninteresting.  So, I crossed back over the bridge and down the steps as far as possible; and found I had to switch to a wide angle lens in order to get the entire bridge in frame.  The steps provided the anchor I wanted in the foreground.  A slow shutter speed and small aperture provided good depth of field and smoothed out the stream.

But, the color was somewhat muddy.  So, a quick conversion to black and white solved that problem and I have a really nice image as a result.

Minnehaha CreekMinnehaha creek downstream from the Falls.

I'm sometimes amazed by how quickly nature can recover from major disasters.

I met some people down at Minnehaha Falls earlier today to do some shooting.  I haven't been down there for a month (literally, approx. 28 days).  Below is one image I took my last time there.  As you can see, this entire area downstream from the falls was totally under water.  Today, basically back to normal.  In fact, if you look really closely in the water slightly to the left of center you can see the top of a sign.  While there today I checked its height and the sign is about 4.5 feet under water. Furthermore, the base of the sign is probably 1-2 feet above where the stream/river normally resides.

Amazing how quickly things recovered.

Minnehaha Creek Flooded

I wish I had thought of posting this one several days ago to better coincide with the 45th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing.

There re a couple of things that make this image more interesting than it first appears. 

First, it is a color shot.  I tried changing it to black and white, but didn't think it looked as good.

Second, it was taken hand-held (as opposed to using a tripod) with a manually set exposure.  The latter part was easy to figure if you know two things.  The first is that all the light of the moon is reflected sunlight, so set the exposure accordingly.  Second, the way to figure this out is using the old "Sunny 16" rule, which says that the proper exposure on a sunny day is f16 at 1/focal length of your lens.  Since I was using a 400mm lens (which adjusts to 640mm due to the nature of my digital camera), this works out to f16 at approx. 1/600 of a second (which is more than fast enough to hand hold).  However, because the sun is really bright, possibly underexpose a bit by changing this to1/800 of a second.

Sorry if all that is a bit technical, but keep it in mind next time you want to shoot the moon.

full moonThis is a hand-held image of the full moon.