Part 1 of this two part series concentrated on setting up for the waterfall shoot.
This article concentrates on capturing great waterfall images.
Composition Identifying and capturing strong composition is an extremely important part of creating powerful waterfall images.
While the purpose of this article is not to carry out a thorough review of composition, a couple of aspects of composition, curves and environment, will be covered.
Curves can make or break a waterfall image.
With waterfalls, two types of curves are particularly important.
The first type of curve is the curve formed by the water.
Waterfalls that have water that flows or falls in such a way as to form curves tend to create much more interest than waterfalls where the water simply falls straight down.
In essence, graceful curves add an element of elegance to a waterfall.
The second type of curve is any curved object that points toward the waterfall.
This type of curve will repeatedly direct the attention toward the waterfall and strengthen it as the center of interest.
The second major component of waterfall composition, covered in this article, is the environment surrounding the waterfall.
This is extremely important to many waterfall shots.
By itself, falling water is not always that interesting.
Rather, it is the surrounding environment that gives waterfalls much of their character.
Therefore, why not include some of that environment in the image to bring out the waterfall character.
The surrounding rocks, trees, and vegetation can make the waterfall image come alive.
Shutter speed What shutter speed should be used to blur the falling water? That seems to be the first question that people usually ask about shooting waterfalls.
However, there is no such thing as one correct shutter speed for shooting waterfalls! Rather, the proper shutter speed is a function of five factors:

• The amount of blur desired
• The volume of water
• The speed of the water
• The distance between camera and water
• The direction of water flow with respect to the lens

In short, the best shutter speed varies from one waterfall to another.
At first, that might sound a little bit daunting, "How can I ever figure out the best shutter speed; it changes from one waterfall to the next?" Actually, with a digital camera, it is easy to find the best shutter speed.
You can simply take some test shots at different shutter speeds and examine the results on the camera monitor.
Zooming in on the monitor will allow you to see the water detail fairly well.
For large waterfalls with huge volumes of tumultuous water, where it is desired to capture the violent nature of the falling water, 1/100 second is a good shutter speed with which to start.
For smaller waterfalls, waterfalls with less water, or waterfalls where it is desired to produce a dreamy look, a shutter speed of 1/2 second to 2 seconds might be used.
Exposure Getting the right exposure can sometimes be a challenge when photographing waterfalls.
Probably, one of the biggest problems is that it is easy to clip the highlights in the water.
What this means is that the detail in the water is lost, and the water becomes just a big area of pure white.
When this happens, the water just doesn't look very real.
The solution for this problem is to take a test shot of the waterfall and check the histogram on the monitor of your digital camera.
If the histogram is cut off on the right side, the highlights have been clipped.
If this is the case, the exposure needs to be decreased.
Summary With these tips, you should be on your way to capturing some great waterfall images.