Water falling - slowly

Certainly there is no "correct" way to photograph or present images of waterfalls. That very silky look as exemplified by the posted image has been very popular for a number of years.

My current, personal preference is for a less silky look. Some waterfall images even seem to work best when shot to freeze the motion and to show individual drops. Even when using a slower shutter speed, I tend to prefer only a slightly silky look. Again this is all personal taste and preference. As the photographer it is up to you to decide what you prefer.

In addition to the slow, silky look, you have also made a whole lot of other choices. You decided that you wanted a standard sort of depiction. It looks like this was shot at standing height with a focal length more or less matching a typical human field of view. You had endless other choices. You could have shot tight on the waterfall or even just a small portion of it. You could have shot from a low angle, dropped the sky out of the image or shot it less centered.

In addition to preferences, intent becomes a major factor. What is it that you want to communicate to the viewer?

Sorry, I am not trying to imply you should have done something differently. The vast majority of my travel photos fall into the category of snapshot, depiction, memory photo or whatever other term you like. I was just trying to understand what question you were asking and what sort of response you wanted.

I’m generally a fan of the freeze motion look - unless I get the silky appearance because I won’t raise the ISO!

Personally I'm not a huge fan of the very silky water look and I would have shot it faster. I really like the damp dry stone wall at the top of the shot, lovely colours and textures but that's probably a huge personal bias. If you could have shot from more to the left so that the stone blocks on the left bank were less in the centre of the frame that may have been better?

David

Nice shot - I like the look of the water! I would perhaps go for a slightly lower POV, but of course it depends on the terrain if that's even possible.

Very nice scene and although I am not a huge fan of silky water, I like it when I feel it suits the scene and in this case I feel both silky and "frozen" water work. So it comes down to personal preference.

The only thing I find a little distracting is the sky at the top in the background. For me. it's a distracting eye-magnet and if you haven't already tried it, perhaps experiment by cropping from the bottom to the top of the stone wall at the right; effectively cropping out the sky. I sense it would help the waterfall be more of the subject and standout.

Thank you for sharing 🙂

I like it but… well, it isn’t the grandest of waterfalls :) On a critical note, it looks like some of the highlight detail is blown (might or might not be recoverable from the RAW) - the highlight warning blinkies w/exposure compensation are your friends here. Auto-WB often tends to fail with these sorts of shots (often producing distinctly purple/magenta results), not too bad here, but I might be inclined to tweak the WB towards a slightly warmer rendering.
I also agree with Danno above, you might want to play with the crop a bit to better showcase the main attraction.

Erik

I quite like it too. Waterfalls can be shot fast (stop action) or slow (silky) or in between. Some waterfalls work better one way or another for me (tiny trickle waterfalls look terrible with stop action and monsters can look silly with silky), but some, like this one, fall in between and might look fine in either. I like the approach you chose and the straight-on angle you took because it's a little different from standard fare of quarter side angle. The water looks pretty good, but it's missing some detail in the two lightest spots. You might be able to retrieve it from the original, especially if you shot in raw format. That same retrieval might give you some extra detail in the sky, which is a bit of an eye magnet now. If I couldn't tame the sky with retrieval I might crop it off. I'd also give some consideration to removing that white thing at the base of the lovely stone wall, it looks like a drainage pipe.