During my travels around the world, I photographed water everywhere.  Water is one of our most important resources and we have to manage it very carefully.

© Wolfgang Kaehler

One of my favorite subjects to photograph relating to water is a waterfall.  Depending on the angle of the sunshine you get beautiful rainbows.  To freeze the water while plunging down, you have to use fast shutter speeds such as 1/500 of a second.

© Wolfgang Kaehler

  When it is overcast I try to use the slowest shutter speed possible.  I set my camera up on a tripod and try to use shutter speeds below 1/10 of a second to make the water look silky.  Sometimes I use a neutral density filter to achieve shutter speeds of 1 or 2 seconds.  This totally slows down the flow and makes the water look soft.

© Wolfgang Kaehler

There are plenty of other opportunities to photograph water.  On a hot day kids love to play in fountains.  In desert countries many villages don’t have running water and mostly children go to a well or faucet to get water for the family.  I try to use as much as possible backlighting to bring out the water.  The same when I photograph water in nature: the backlighting put reflections onto the water drops and makes the image alive.  In case of the spider web in front of a maple tree, I used a long lens with a wide open aperture to separate the web from the tree and have the tree blurred

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