No sunset addition, just dam

[Hawks Feather]

I had a a spare hour today so I headed out to the Power Dam just outside of town.  Frozen above the dam, but open for about a hundred yards below the dam.  Ducks, geese, and a few (high flying) eagles were there as well.  But the only thing I shot was the dam.  Defiance owned the power dam, but it had not been in service for many years.  So, what should they do?  Why keep something you don't use?  Yep, they sold it to Bryan who was more than happy to invest in the power plant.  From what was learned by the paper years back, they didn't really have to invest that much and they recouped their investment in the first year.  So it was great for Bryan and not a good choice for Defiance.

[JohnP]

Is that a beaver house or just a pile of logs and stuff?

[FinsnFur]

Damn! that is one incredible shot. I'm guessing HDR..but since I havent gotten to work that yet and know little about it, I'm still wowed Thats pretty sweet 

[Hawks Feather]

Is that a beaver house or just a pile of logs and stuff?

That is just the top of a pile in the river.  I saw a beaver in the Maumee a couple of years ago and then one was run over here in town.  Maybe it is because they live in the river ranter than small streams, but around here they tunnel up under the bank much like a muskrat.  I have never seen a beaver dam in northwest Ohio, but have in other parts of the state.

Jerry

[Hawks Feather]

I'm guessing HDR.

We have a winner!  I was actually shooting with a neutral density filter to get some 'flow' in the water.  But with long exposures I thought that I would play it safe and do some bracketing.  Then when I started looking at the one I liked best I thought that the HDR might give it some extra definition and went that way.  I didn't go to wild with the settings so that it would still look a little bit like what it was.

Jerry

[FinsnFur]

The only part of that I understood was "bracketing" lol

Sent from my SCH-R830 using Tapatalk

[Hawks Feather]

Jim,

Here is more information than you asked for.

This is pretty much what you would get from taking a ‘normal’ image.  It was shot at 1/80 of a second, f/20, ISO 100.  The 1/80 of a second is slow enough to show some water movement in the area of the falls, but not really the ‘flow’ that I wanted.  It also shows the surface swirls in the foreground water which I really didn't care for much.

This one has a neutral density filter, basically a dark piece of glass over the camera lens.  This cuts down the amount of light coming in and allows the shutter speed to go from the 1/80 to 11 seconds and upped the f/stop to f/22.  With the longer exposure time the movement of the water becomes more of ‘flow’ than ‘stopped’. 

This one is the same as above with a 5 second exposure.

And finally one with a 20 second exposure.


I could have made any one of the last three images into a picture that would have shown the ‘flow’ that I had sort of hoped to get, but there is a loss of detail since it was shot in bright sun.  So, since I had the three images I decided to merge them into one image.  If I were really planning to shoot this for HDR I would have taken at least 5 shots for the merge â€" normal exposure, one stop over, two stops over, three stops over, one stop under, two stops under, and three stops under.  That would have given even better detail.  A tripod is not required for some HDR shots, but if you want a decent image you need one.  Without it you must rely on the processing program to align the images.  Where it also becomes a necessity is when you are looking at longer exposures.  But you can probably hand hold your camera for 20 seconds without moving it. . . . but I sure can’t.

Jerry

[FinsnFur]

Interesting   Thanks for that.
And no I cant hold mine steady for 20 seconds. My camera either.
I need to find more time to play around with camera though..seems I dont have a lot of free time anymore