VIOLENT WATER

Canon EOS DIGITAL REBEL XS, Tamron 28-80 lens @ 32mm, ISO 400, f/8, 1/3 sec.

  Sunday morning I made my usual trek down River Rd in the Cherokee National Forest.  I was bound and determined to take some more photos of Baby Falls when I wasn't getting soaked by rain.  Mother Nature was much more kind to me this time. Sunny skies!  When I left the house it was a nippy 38°F though so it was a bit chilly to start. By the time I came back 3 hours later, it had warmed up to a comfy 68°F making the morning wonderful.
  After shooting at Baby Falls for a while, I found a new spot from the road that I had to explore.  The climb down to this spot was very dangerous. Slick rocks on a steep hill.  The night before we watch "127 Hours" and don't think that being wedged between a couple of rocks for 5 days didn't pass through my mind on the way down.  My wife also made me tell her where I would be at and what time I would be back just in case something bad did happen.  But carefully and slowly I safely traversed my down to water level.
  When I found my perch on a massive rock right at the water's edge, I realized that the water flow was incredibly violent.  I mean roaring and fast.  This was the same condition as I noticed last weekend at Baby Falls, but there hadn't been any rain in a couple of days and this wasn't a waterfall.  The sights and sounds of the river when it is like this are jaw-dropping.  I loved it.
  With the sun already up, I was still using my 3-stop ND filter and was getting 8-10 second exposures. I will post an example of those longer exposures in another post.  What I wanted though, was to capture the violence of the river so I bumped up my ISO to 400 and took the ND filter off the lens.  When I shoot water I tend to shoot in apertures of f/8, f/11, f/14, f/16, and f/22 then change the ISO and reverse my order.  I followed suit here and found that f/8 at ISO 400 still provided some silky smoothness to the water but also caught the splashing and rage of the river.
  The trees haven't all completely filled out yet so there really wasn't a lot of color other than the blue tint of the water, so I converted the image to black and white to kind of even the playing field.