One thing I’ve been itching to do all autumn is to visit Silverfallet. I’ve been there quite a few times already, but just never managed to do it in the autumn. Or rather, I did it once, but it rained so hard that I had to give up after one picture. And today, two out of three weather forecasts said that it would rain but I took a chance – and won! *
It was quite windy though, but if I didn’t do this now, then the next opportunity would be next year. There’s still a lot of colour left in the trees but one week is a long time in the autumn so there’s no counting on any nice colour next weekend.
I would have wanted to use really long shutterspeeds but the wind was an issue. It was almost constant so the trees were moving all the time, so I compromised and used 0.5 – 2 sec shutter speeds, trying to pick a moment when the trees weren’t moving quite that much. But it was only getting worse the higher up I got, and by the time I reached the actual Silverfallet fall, it became hopeless. The only way I could have ”frozen” the trees was to use such a short shutter speed that I would lose the blur effect on the water. So I tried to go the other way, use a very long shutter despite everything, and blur the trees so much that it doesn’t just look like the picture is shaken. However, I found that this strategy doesn’t quite work, note for me anyway, my eye is drawn to the blurred trees and it just bothers me.
But if the wind got worse, the light got better. The clouds were obviously moving very fast, so the light was constantly shifting between sunny and cloudy and things in between. And there was a little bit of rain as well, and suddenly there it was – a rainbow over the falls! I could hardly believe my luck! It was not easy though because the lens got sprayed all the time, so I had to wipe it in between frames. I can tell you I was very nervous when I got home, to see if any of the rainbow pictures worked out. And I was very happy to see that some of them did!
If yesterday was a total waste, then today compensated for it (and for all the other disappointments this week, I’ll write about it later). Apart from the wind, I couldn’t really have wished for any better weather. In the end, it’s the light that counts!
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* I have started using vackertvader.se which collects forecasts from yr.no, smhi.se and fmi.fi, and the only forecast which said that it could be a little sunny was FMI. 😀