Waterfall photography at Coal Creek Falls

The beginning of the Coal Creek Falls walk in Runanga

I don't do a lot of waterfall photography, despite having a beautiful waterfall literally 10 minutes drive (and then a half hour walk) from my front door!

Coal Creek Falls is an impressive waterfall, situated in the small township of Runanga. It's a very easy walk, on a well maintained track, although a couple of sections of the walk are slightly steep - and if it's been raining a lot some sections can be rather muddy. But solid footwear and a little up-hill huffing and puffing will see you right.

The other well-known local waterfalls - Dorothy Falls and Carew Falls - are a little further away. About a 45 minute and an hours drive away respectively. I have photographed all three of them, but Coal Creek Falls happens to be my favourite of the three.

So why don't I shoot waterfalls more often? Well, I think there's two main reasons. First, it requires very overcast conditions to get the best out of an image - and I don't tend to shoot in overcast conditions. And second, to take a really good waterfall image requires some very specific gear. Gear I don't generally have. Namely, a high grade neutral density (ND) filter (more on that later).

Backlit Fern. E-M1 with 12-40mm Pro. 1/50th @ f2.8

Perhaps, if I'm honest, there's possibly one other reason why I have struggled shooting at Coal Creek Falls. I'm scared of it.

Seven years ago (in 2012), while on a photoshoot, I fell into the water at the falls and completely destroyed my Canon 5D and 24-105mm lens (see the post here). I was completely distraught, my home insurance didn't cover the cost of a new camera, and thus began the arduous task (for me) of searching for a new camera system. So Coal Creek Falls and I don't get on all that well. Especially since the best place to photograph them is, once again, out in the creek itself. Trust me when I say, those damn rocks are slippery!

Don't get me wrong, I have taken photos at the Coal Creek Walk often. I've just never really ever taken a good photo of the waterfall itself. But this year, I plan to change all that.

So far this year (just one month into it), I've gotten up early every Saturday morning to go out and take photos. For the first two weekends I've concentrated on medium format film with my Bronica ETRS. But last weekend (as I write this), I decided to shoot with my E-M1 and go to the Falls. A quick check on a weather app suggested that conditions would be favourable (overcast), so I was hopeful of getting my best shots ever from Coal Creek.

Tree Ferns. E-M1 with 12-40mm Pro. 1/50th @ f2.8

As mentioned, it's an easy half-hour walk through native forest to get to the falls, and there's plenty of opportunity to take some great images along the track. At certain times of the year it's a popular spot for fungi photography, as well as offering numerous flora and the occasional friendly bird. I've stopped to photograph something along the way numerous times and been joined by an inquisitive robin who will hop around very close by, unperturbed by human visitors.

Forest areas can be tricky to photograph in, since the interior lighting can be quite low. But if you look for shafts of light, and can isolate subjects and shoot wide open (at f2.8 or thereabouts), then you can get away with still shooting hand-held. Not that using a tripod isn't an option on such an easy walking track. I've set up a tripod many times and there's always plenty of room for other walkers to go around you so that you're not holding up traffic. There are also one or two places along the walk where it's safe to get away from the track and scramble down to the waters edge to take some images from the creek itself.

Macro lenses come into their own in woodland locations, even if the end-goal is a more traditional landscape waterfall shot. Densely wooded areas can feel quite overwhelming, so train yourself to pick out the small details among the vastness. A single fern frond or section of bush can often tell a more compelling story than trying to capture an entire grove of trees. To be honest, I don't actually own a macro lens (I may have to rectify that in the future), but find that I can often get 'close enough' using the 40mm end of my 12-40mm zoom lens.

Leaf Litter. OM-D E-M1 with Zuiko 12-40mm f2.8 Pro. 1/13th sec @ f2.8 (hand held). ISO 100

Zoomed right in at 40mm (80mm equivalent focal length on 35mm), and shooting wide open at f2.8, the shutter speed in the forest was still only 1/13th sec. Yes, I could have bumped up the ISO to 800 or so to increase the shutter speed - especially since I was hand-holding. But I wanted to keep the ISO as low as possible (even to the point of shooting in the extended Low ISO 100 setting on the E-M1), and I was fairly confident that the amazing ibis (in body image stabilization) of the Olympus would still give me an acceptably sharp hand-held shot at these speeds. I took three or four shots of the same image just to be sure, but I needn't of bothered - they were all sharp where I had focused (on the central leaf).

HDR Tree. E-M1 with 12-40mm f2.8. 1/25th @ f4

Another technique I tried out on the E-M1 this time around was the in-camera HDR. This is easy to access with a button press on the top left of the camera, but it's something I have rarely ever used.

Looking through the evf (electronic viewfinder) of the camera at certain scenes, I could tell that the dynamic range (range of light from dark to bright) was too great for the sensor to capture with just one image. In this scenario, taking several images with different exposures and blending them together later on in Photoshop will yield a single image that can capture all light in the scene (hence HDR - high dynamic range - photography). This has become a very popular (if not highly controversial) technique used by landscape photographers who routinely find themselves shooting scenes with a high dynamic range. There are other ways around this (using filters in certain parts of the scene to lower the contrast), but HDR photography has become so popular that it's being built right into the cameras themselves.

Traditionally, to do HDR means setting your camera on a tripod and taking several exposures of the same scene, at various exposures, so that when you 'blend' them together later on in software they all match up seamlessly. This, of course, facilitates using a tripod each and every time, and setting up the camera specifically to shoot several bracketed exposures. Quite a bit of faffing about.

With the in-camera HDR on the E-M1 (and other cameras), you can avoid all of this and hand-hold the camera as it shoots a series of exposures very quickly, and then blends them together in the camera. If you are shooting in RAW, two images will be saved on the card; the first RAW image you took, and the final camera-generated HDR Jpeg. The final result isn't perfect - the tree above still has some blocked-up shadows, and the contrast needs to be tweaked later on the computer. But the result is quite impressive given how dark the shadows were and how bright the highlights when I was capturing the scene. And all hand-held!

Fallen Log. Olympus OM-D E-M1 with Zuiko 12-40mm f2.8 Pro. 1/13th @ f4.5. Polarising filter. ISO 200.

My end-goal on this excursion was to take the best image of the Coal Creek Falls that I had ever taken. To that end, I had worn my waders (gumboots here in NZ) so that I could walk into the creek for the best vantage points. This also meant that along the way, I was confident enough to go off the beaten track and explore some of the edges of the bank. The above image is one that I never would have taken if I had been wearing trainers and had stuck to the track.

Coal Creek Falls. OM-D E-M1 with Zuiko 12-40mm f2.8 Pro. 2.5secs @ f8. ISO 200. Variable ND

The above image is my second favourite image from the day. It's certainly one of the better ones I've taken of Coal Creek Falls, but on shooting it I came to two conclusions. First, it's really an evening location, and not a morning one. I had gone out on this particular morning because it was overcast conditions - ideal for minimising reflections in the water. However, by the time I got to the falls, the weather had brightened considerably, and the sun was up almost right on top of the waterfall. Damn. A polarising filter helped - but the glare from the sun was too much for it - as you can see above.

And second, a variable ND filter is practically useless, and don't buy one! They are a great idea in theory, and are basically two polarising filters sandwiched together. When you rotate them, they gradually decrease the amount of light going through the lens, and therefore lower the exposure. So good so far. But, when they are facing the light (as they were in this case), the more you rotate it the funkier it gets in terms of weird polarising shifts and blacked out areas of the image! When I rotated past around 3 seconds of filtration, the results were unusable. So it's back to the drawing board for ND filters.

Coal Creek Falls 2. OM-D E-M1 with Zuiko 12-40mm f2.8 lens. 6 secs @ f5.6. ISO 200. Variable ND filter

This is my favourite shot of the morning - and yes, my favourite shot I've ever taken of Coal Creek Falls. But it's still not great. I've had to crop in a lot to get rid of those funky polarising effects, and done some fairly major post-processing work to get the image to where I like it. It's OK, but it's not amazing! And I know I can do much better.

Next time I'll go in the evening. Next time I won't use a variable ND filter (I'll use a dedicated slotted filter with my Cokin system instead). And next time I'll be able to shoot with a polarising filter as well, to minimise the reflection on the waters surface even more. I'm close this time - but no cigar.