Bill Ford-SmithHilton Falls
Posted on April 17, 2016
Hilton Falls is a rather pleasant conservation area a few miles inland from Oakville, featuring a number of nice and easy walks in the woods that cover that part of the Niagara Escarpment.
This picture is of the falls themselves, shot using a variable ND filter; timing was critical, to find a gap of several seconds when people weren’t clambering around or behind the water…!
In the Nineteenth Century there were sawmills here, but all that remains now are a few stones.
For those wondering, the precise 9.6 sec exposure was absolutely planned for to get the exact exposure required, and not under any circumstances the result of counting to ten under my breath before closing the shutter! 😉
Frozen Niagara Falls (kind of)
Posted on March 1, 2015
This winter has been another rather nippy one (although, so far, rather less long drawn-out than last year’s), with one result being that the American Falls at Niagara have largely frozen over.
All the headlines in the news made it sound like it was the Horseshoe Falls that froze over; naturally it wasn’t!
Regardless, the American Falls are still pretty impressive with this much ice on them.
(nerd note: the long exposure courtesy of a variable ND filter)
Tiffany Falls
Posted on September 11, 2014
Tiffany Falls is one of the many waterfalls that drop down over the Niagara Escarpment around Hamilton; this was taken on the second trip out to find the falls – I’d failed miserably to find it the first time!
This image is a fairly straightforward long(ish) exposure; the overall effect was generated via Color Efex Pro.
Visiting Albion Falls in strong sunshine.
Posted on September 2, 2014
Albion Falls is one of the more beautiful of the many waterfalls that cascade down the Niagara Escarpment in and around Hamilton.
Rather than being sensible and waiting for good lighting, on this occasion I was there close to midday and had to deal with bright sunshine making the scene hideously contrasty (I also had to frame the shot carefully – there were a couple of young ladies in bikinis doing a photo-shoot and I didn’t think it good form to include them in the shot!).
A variable density ND filter helped keep some of the light under control and allowed a long enough exposure to smooth the water out reasonably well; the final step was to combine two separate exposures into one HDR image, to cope with the worst of the contrast.
Since the image is all tone and not much colour, a black and white conversion seemed to be in order.
Bill Ford-Smith 