Three common photographic techniques

[johnmcgowan]

1. How to take a good picture of the reflection in the water.
The water must be quiet, as the saying goes: level is the same as the mirror, only if the water is like mirror, the scene on the shore can be effectively reflected in the water. The picture is better when it is backlighting. Even if the water is quiet, if the light conditions are not ideal, the reflection is not perfect. In general, the best light is he low light back lighting while shooting reflection, followed sidelight and diffused light, while the top light and front light are the worst lights in this situation. Under ideal lighting conditions, the sky and scene will form a light and shade contrast, which reflect more clear and distinct on the water.
The low point of view must be chose while shooting. The number of reflections in the pictures has a close relationship with the selection of the viewpoint. If the viewpoint is high, the reflection becomes less; if the viewpoint is low, the reflection appears much more, and the reflection itself is big and full. Exposure must be accurate. Reflection is generally generated on the water, the reflections often give the photographer the visual illusion that the brightness of the shooting scene is high. In fact, the brightness of the real scene when it is back lighting and the reflection is not high. We can refer to the exposure value under backbitght conditions while shooting, which is 1-2 aperture higher than normal exposure or slow down the shutter speed to 1-2 grade.
As the photo is often took on the waterfront shore, once the angle of shooting is low, the lens are easily disturbed by the messy reflected light on the water, forming the light burst mirror, causing the halo phenomenon, affecting the screen. So, it is better to use the camera hood while shooting.
2. How to take a good picture of the boiling water.
There will be a lot of steam emerge from the boiling water, causing a certain level of difficulties while shooting, so how to shoot to create the effect of boiling water? All we need is a photographer using a pipe to blow bubbles underwater, and then we can have both the effect of boiling water and avoid the steam, consequently, the quality of the image can be improved.
3. How to take a good picture of the fish in the aquarium.
While in this situation, it is better to make the room completely dark. Then put the flash above the water, farther from the surface in order to distribute the light uniformly, close to the water in order to the high brightness, but not in the water. Using the sync cable to connect the camera and flash, but not with lead flashing. Before shooting, if the photographers are unsure how to use exposure, they can pre-shoot using the manual or aperture, then choose the appropriate aperture coefficient.
You can get a special photo if you process the photo effect a little.

[HaseebM]

Can you show us an example of the reflections in water? Thanks for sharing the techniques.

[jcuknz]

It ignores the potential of post processing becuase if you want a reflection it can readilly be organised in editing.

"The Rower"
This not the best example but the original file was for some reason incredibly soft so I 'rescued' it by applying the threshold tool and I prefer that stark result. However it jars with some people so I took the sky from an adjacent file and replaced the white sky area and then inverted another copy of it and adjusted its density to be the reflection.
It is quite possible that one will need to alter the reflection copy, reducing its height but not width, to correspond with the compression of a reflection caused by one's height above the water.
The water in this case was not completely flat and still.

edit ... Nov 2003 I note today my editing was not so precise then as it might be today

[John Morton]

Just as the darkened back of a mirror or a darkened window reflect light well, so too does water reflect well if it is in shadow when the scene being reflected is brightly lit. Here, I was situated under a bridge sop that the water reflecting the image was in shade, while that which was reflected was out in the open sun:





More than anything else I have found that High Dynamic Range techniques are unsurpassed for capturing reflections. Often, the reflected image will be there but will be distinctly fainter than the dominant elements in the image; so capturing a range of exposures and them combining them using HDR techniques will often reveal reflections the photographer did not realize were available for image capture: