Photography Excursion

I woke up early today to carry out my plans to head up into the mountains to take some pictures at Boulder Falls. As I said before, I wanted to play around with my shutter speeds and aperture settings. I was hoping that if I got there early enough, the light in the canyon wouldn't be so harsh. I got there at about 10:00 and I guess I was a little too late. The sun just crept over the mountain and the light was shining directly in the canyon but the falls were hidden in a shadow. That made playing with my shutter speeds and aperture settings pretty difficult. Actually, it was a disaster. When you slow down the shutter speed, more light gets into the camera. Usually you can balance things out by increasing the aperture number (making the aperture smaller). My whole purpose for using a slow shutter speed was to try to get that silky effect that you see in some pictures of waterfalls. I tried to slow down my shutter speed and set the aperture at the highest setting (smallest opening), but too much light kept coming in. Everything was washed out and too bright. Sigh. I suppose that I need to get to the falls a whole lot earlier or much later in the afternoon when the sun isn't shining directly into the canyon.

Oh well. Here is the best of all of my efforts: