Flowing water: Real or silky? Personally, I do not like long exposure times of water. I prefer photos as the eye perceives them. A long exposure of a poor waterfall to make it look as...

Streets Loc: Euless, TX.

Personally, I do not like long exposure times of water. I prefer photos as the eye perceives them. A long exposure of a poor waterfall to make it look as though it's a torrent is fakery at it's worst and not a work of art. What are your feelings on this subject?

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RickL Loc: Vail, Az

Streets wrote:

Personally, I do not like long exposure times of water. I prefer photos as the eye perceives them. A long exposure of a poor waterfall to make it look as though it's a torrent is fakery at it's worst and not a work of art. What are your feelings on this subject?

Angel hair seems to be very popular and not very hard to do. I prefer to see water as the eye sees it.

Rick

Rab-Eye Loc: Indiana

I admit to loving the long exposure look.

Mustanger Loc: Grants Pass, Oregon USA

I really like both! They both can be stunning. Problem solved.

ebbote Loc: Hockley, Texas

I like the real look.

axiesdad Loc: Monticello, Indiana

Each to his own taste, but I think your complaint is a little like saying your favorite shade of red is the only "good" one. The picture you have posted is very nice, but so are some of the long exposure ones.

PhotoPhred Loc: Cheyney, Pa

I like big waterfalls to have a "real" look and small wispy waterfalls to have the "angelhair" look. I like your posted photo.

mwsilvers Loc: Central New Jersey

Streets wrote:

Personally, I do not like long exposure times of water. I prefer photos as the eye perceives them. A long exposure of a poor waterfall to make it look as though it's a torrent is fakery at it's worst and not a work of art. What are your feelings on this subject?

It is a creative approach intended to instill a particular mood into an image. Sometimes it can be very effective, sometimes not so much. It is also sometimes just an artifact, whether intended or not. of long exposures created for other reasons than to just show silky water. An example might be a night scene of a city across a bay. Whether one cares for it or not is a matter of taste I suppose, but all photography is artificial and doesn't really accurately represent reality. You eye doesn't perceive the stopped action of flowing water any more than it perceives the silky look of from a long exposure. Neither looks entirely "natural" to me.

pesfls Loc: Oregon, USA

Like the old saying goes, "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder." I like both depending on the lighting/mood of the scene. But I would not say long exposure of moving water is "fakery..." It's most likely what the photographer wanted. Each to their own in my book. A camera is no different than a painter's brush as both are free to do as they wish.

SierraP Loc: Eastern Sierras

I'm with you. Long streaks of white do not look like water flowing to me.

TonyBot

Mustanger wrote:

I really like both! They both can be stunning. Problem solved.

Completely agree. Sometimes the silky look of an exposure of 10- or 15-seconds is beautiful, evoking a foggy, ethereal look, and sometimes the *straight* shot gives is a better rendition. It is all in the eyes of the maker. And then, something I like every now and then, is a 1/8th to 1/4th second exposure that gives just a hint of movement, what I like to call the "tension", and can change a static *pictoral* shot into something that shows the dynamics of the scene.

YOUR photograph is all about what YOU see!

mwsilvers Loc: Central New Jersey

pesfls wrote:

Like the old saying goes, "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder." I like both depending on the lighting/mood of the scene. But I would not say long exposure of moving water is "fakery..." It's most likely what the photographer wanted. Each to their own in my book. A camera is no different than a painter's brush as both are free to do as they wish.

All photograph is fakery to various degrees. Always has been. You don't believe that monochrome photography looks just like real life, do you? But would you also call the use of monochrome fakery? Silky water is just a creative effect. You either like it or you don't. The same could be said for background blur separating a subject from it's background with a shallow depth of field. We don't see things like that in real life.

SueScott Loc: Hammondsville, Ohio

Although a long exposure can make a water scene look very artistic, for the most part I prefer water in its natural state.

Say Cheese Loc: Eastern PA

I suspect the first person to make a milky flowing water scene was someone with his camera loaded with ASA 25 film in a dark area at dusk. He had to make a 12 second exposure to capture what he saw and came up with something no one had ever seen before. It may have been an eureka moment.
I like both milky and normal, as others have said it depends of the rest of the picture.

The OP said "I prefer photos as the eye perceives them". At what shutter speed does the same as how the eye perceives it?
On the picture you can see drops of water but does the eye see them the same? I would say the exposure time on the picture should be a bit longer to allow the dropping water to elongatate just a bit to how we may actually see it.

It would be a good experiment to make exposures starting at multiple seconds to hundreths of seconds. Then we can figure out what we capture on a picture what we see with our eyes.

d3200prime

Streets wrote:

Personally, I do not like long exposure times of water. I prefer photos as the eye perceives them. A long exposure of a poor waterfall to make it look as though it's a torrent is fakery at it's worst and not a work of art. What are your feelings on this subject?

Here we go again!