I often have lunch next to the Puyallup River near Orting. It’s a nice little spot where the road is just above the level of the river, and there are even some paths down to the water. In hot weather, you can find dozens of families relaxing and letting the kids play in the water.
Someone though was playing with rocks. This particular flavor is called Stone Balancing.
Technical info: This was a very tough scene to photograph. The stones were (mostly) in shadow; the sun was slowly getting lower for a few minutes here and there, a bit of light would fall on one stone or the other. I have a lot of shots that don’t work because I could not find a happy balance between sunlight and shade that also looked good.
This particular shot is a time exposure, which smooths out the flow of the river. I also used a wide aperture to limit the depth of focus, but the 120mm f/4 lens doesn’t have a thin depth of focus even wide open (an f/2.8 lens would be better, but I didn’t have that one with me). The narrow focus would have helped isolate the tower.
This shot was 13 seconds long, more than enough to smooth the water and remove that distraction. This was better than the limited depth of focus approach, which was good because I had to use f/11 to enable the long exposure. ISO setting was 50.
Here is an f/4 exposure that has somewhat similar lighting; the depth of focus is much smaller, but it doesn’t help isolate the stacked stones as well as the blended water does:
And the illumination on the stones themselves is…OK, but the bright stone is against the bright part of the background.
It took about 25 shots to finally figure out the best way to shoot this stack of stones: remove the fine texture of the water with a long exposure, and wait for a magic moment when the stones where illuminated in an attractive way by sun filtered through lots and lots of leaves.
I spent over an hour on this little project, and honestly it was just good luck to get even one shot that made me happy.