Photographing Two Impressive Alpine Waterfalls

Wasserfall Zug

A last minute discovery, Zug waterfall was well worth the short and easy hike, and had the added bonus during autumn of being almost deserted.

I ran around a bit mindlessly taking photos as I thought the sun was going to come over the mountain and cause issues, but of course being late in the year it didn’t actually reach high enough to do that…at least while we were there.

While editing the video I came to wish I’d taken some photos of the waterfall from a distance with a long lens. I’m not actually sure if I had my 70-300mm on me, but I think there was potential for more interesting shots from the bend in the stream, with some autumn trees framing the waterfall, which would likely have obscured much of the mess closer to the falls.

I often don’t consider shots from much further back with a longer focal length, yet the compression given can tie two subjects together in a way that’s not always obvious in person, and can lead to very pleasing results. This is something I want to keep in mind in the future.

Finally a fly!

Two weeks into our time in the Alps and I finally flew my drone! Unfortunately I forgot to bring my ND filters with me, so I wasn’t able to smooth out the falls at all.

It had been a long time since I’d last flown my drone and it showed. It wasn’t helped that in the most interesting direction the sun was hitting the lens at the perfect angle to almost obscure the entire view – it made it difficult not only to get good footage/images, but just to fly. Still, it was a joy to use, and it continued to get a lot of use for the remainder of the trip.

Kesselfall

The following afternoon we stopped off to check out Kesselfall on our way home. The exploits from that morning will be coming in a future video because we returned to that location for a more thorough adventure a few days later and it made more sense to put them together into one video, and put Kesselfall with Zug.

This gorge took me completely by surprise, as I’d not seen a single photo that came even close to doing it justice. While I don’t think mine are able to truly capture how impressive it is either, I do think the 14mm shot of the falls below does a much better job than anything else I’ve seen.

While Zug was a good candidate for a longer lens, Kesselfall was an excellent one for the ultra-wide. I don’t shoot ultra-wide that much, so still defaulted back to trying to capture smaller scenes with my 24-105mm, however I think the ultra-wide shots do the best job of conveying the true feel of the place, and are the ones I prefer.