If you like this article, you can now get the book! Joe has expanded the “Tuesday Composition” series into an inspiring new ebook on composition, especially for nature photography. Check it out: The Tuesday Composition.

Like mist and fog, water is a subject that deserves it’s own consideration compositionally. With the exception of very still lakes and ponds, one of the things that makes water “look like water” to us is the way that it moves. We can’t present this movement in a still image to a viewer directly. Instead, we have to translate it into a still image by making an exposure; and we use a variety of controls such as shutter speed and composition to help communicate a sense of that motion.

When we want to capture a sense of movement in water there are several things to keep in mind. Shutter speed has a significant effect-a waterfall, cascade or even surf against a coastline will have a very soft, gentle feel if we use a long exposure. Faster exposures will stop individual droplets in air, creating a greater sense of energy.  Shutter speed isn’t the only thing to keep an eye on, though. The way we compose the path of water through a scene can also affect how viewers experience water moving through a scene. Where possible, try and make it easy for the viewer’s eye to trace along the lines of the water’s path. Your images will (all other things being equal) be more effective if the visual flow of the water isn’t interrupted by things that block the view of the water. Diagonals and  S-curves can also create an additional sense of motion.

My early  Trillium Falls images demonstrate this. Taken on the same day, a few minutes apart, they both enjoy a really interesting subject and spectacular color. What makes them different is their composition. Despite the similarities, Trillium Falls II is by far the more popular of the two images; it is in fact my largest selling image to date. (Small matted prints of this image make great Christmas presents!)  Were I to edit that shoot today, I’d probably leave Trillium Falls I on the editing-room floor. That’s not that I is a bad image, it’s simply that II is more effective, and the greatest reason it’s more effective (I believe) is that the flow of water through the waterfall is less interrupted in II than in I.

Still water is an entirely different photographic animal. If you want to really emphasize the stillness of a body of water, you’ll want to avoid the lines, curves, diagnoals and other movement cues we used above. Often uninterrupted expanses of water can work well for this.

Very smooth water surfaces can take on a mirror-like surface, which can be an interesting source of reflections. To get the best “mirror-like” reflections, you’ll want not only completely smooth water, but also a shallow viewing angle, which puts some practical constraints on your compositions. Looking straight down into a still lake you’ll typically be able to see a lot of what’s underneath. It is when you look farther out into the lake that the reflections become more dominant. It’s possible (and sometimes even interesting) to make use of this effect, to show a little bit of “what’s underneath” and ‘what’s reflected” in different parts of the same scene, as I have in Bush Skeleton. (Polarizers also have an effect on how mirror-like a water surface will appear.)

Because of its transparency, its reflectiveness and its movement, water is an interesting and unusual part of the compositional playbook.

The first challenge in finding a rainbow is finding one to photograph in the first place. Any rainbow requires two elements, light and water droplets. The light needs to be from small source and very bright, so it’ll usually need to be direct sunlight (although it is possible to find and photograph “moonbows”) they’re very hard to see and even harder to capture well. The need for both sunlight and rain or mist means you’ll usually need to look for rainbows in mixed weather (rainy conditions without complete overcast) or in other places where mists form in broad sunlight (waterfalls, such as my Iceland image above, geysers, and the like.)

The physics of rainbows shows that when they appear, primary rainbows will always appear at angles about 140 degrees from the sun, in other words, you’ll want to look for rainbows not so much toward the sun as away from it. This figure has one important implication for nature photographers, unless you can see down for a long way (into a deep canyon, or down from a mountaintop or airplane) you won’t be able to see a rainbow in the sky when the sun is high. At moderate latitudes, your chances for rainbows will be limited to the beginning and end of the day. As you move closer to the poles, the sun stays low longer (if there’s sun at all!), and opportunities increase.

Because rainbows aren’t physical objects but reflections from water droplets, it is possible at times to “move the rainbow”, as you move your point of view, the rainbow appears to move relative to the objects in front of and behind it, so long as there is in fact a rainbow visible from the new location. In some situations this will allow you to move the rainbow within the composition, perhaps for the better.

Bringing out the subjective intensity of rainbows seems to require care, all too often snapshots of rainbows lack the punch they seem to have in person. Polarizers (turned correctly) will help here, almost doubling the intensity of the rainbow relative to the scene around it, and are a great place to start. Proper exposure is also critical, as the most saturated rainbow colors will occur if the rainbow is exposed for the midtones, too light or too dark and the colors will muddy up or fade.

One final bit of advice, it is all too easy when one sees a great-looking rainbow to try and photograph it alone, for it’s own sake. While you’ll be able to get some pretty snapshots that way, in general those images rarely seem “great” when you’re done with them. Instead, look to combine rainbows with other elements of the scene, whether as a wide landscape, or as a more abstracted detail shot such as the one at the top of this article, you’ll find those images have a greater potential to really sing.