CONASAUGA FALLS PANORAMA

Canon EOS REBEL XS, Promaster 19-35 lens @ 19mm, ISO 100, f/16, 0.8sec (5 image panorama)

  Although Conasauga Falls is a place I have visited and photographed on 3 different occasions, I was more than happy to take a 4th trip on Saturday morning with my good friend Tim Owens.
  One of the reasons I love this particular waterfall is that it takes some effort to get there. Well, to back from there even more. It is a 1 mile hike down a mountain side to the falls but the hike back up the mountain side can get pretty taxing because it is an up hill battle. Totally worth it, though.
  It was Tim's first trip to the falls.  Not only had Tim not been there before, but it was also my first trip with my new 19-35 lens.
  It was also the first time I had been to a waterfall of any kind since reading Ten Suggestions For better Waterfall Photography by Richard Bernabe on his blog. One of Richard's suggestions was to keep your shutter speeds below 2 seconds because if you expose longer, it renders the water featureless.  This particular suggestion hits home with me because I have noticed that a lot of my water shots have this problem.  I have always worried about my aperture and composition and just stayed content with whatever shutter speed I had as long as it was 0.3" or longer. Saturday morning I really concentrated on the length of my exposure and adjusted the ISO settings to try and keep exposures between 0.3-2.0 seconds and most cases under 1 second.  I think it made a huge difference in the quality of my images.
  The advantage of new wide angle lens paid off on today's image not just by fitting the entire landscape into one shot, but by being able to get a lot closer to the waterfall and fit a wider range in. I thought with a wide angle lens I wouldn't do as many panorama's but found myself able to get fantastic angle to create even better pano's. This shot spanned over 5 vertical images from left to right and blended together in Photoshop Elements Photomerge Panorama.
  Tim absolutely enjoyed his first trip to Conasauga Falls and will probably be there several times more as will I.