Hints + Tips
Moody shots usually means long exposures/shutter times/low iso settings. Its best to avoid strong sunlight conditions as this often means burnt out areas where the water is at its maximum flow. Some of the best images are created in low light conditions, a tripod, camera on a rock is required with the self timer or remote control for firing that shutter. Don't try hand holding @ 1/10 sec it won't work, unless you get lucky.
Look around the water or fall to see what components compliment the scene, if there is a old broken mossy branch just out of view drag it over into your scene.
Todays photographers and the consumer market have many choices of equipment to cover the interests and preferences be it Architecture, Landscapes, Macro. Portrait or Wildlife. From Super Zooms offering 18 x magnification to the Professional Primes costing many thousand pounds.
This article is perhaps aimed at image quality first within a reasonable budget avoiding the extremes of trying to cover the range of 10 -600mm in 2 easy superzooms or a vast amount of very expensive prime lenses.
Assuming our photographer covers all the interest of vast areas of landscape to the distance grabbing wildlife our lens choice will be 4 lenses with a limitation zoom of 4 x taking into account full and 1.6 sensors.
Our choice for both full frame and 1.6 crop Sensors.
Full frame...........12 - 24mm, 24 - 70mm, 70 - 200mm, 100 - 400mm
1.6 crop..............10 - 22mm, 18 - 55/70mm, 70 - 200mm, 100 - 400mm
Camera Branded or 3rd Party Lenses:
The big three of Canon, Nikon and Pentax have there own criteria on how there sensors react to light and branded lenses quite often are matched to these sensors, colour rendition etc. 3rd party lenses are much better these days as the likes of Sigma, Tamron and Tokina development on varying sensors are almost matching the camera brand manufacturer.
This gives the photographer more choice in his equipment at reduced costs especially in the wide angle and medium telephoto zoom areas. Also do we really need those fast lenses costing thousands of pounds when for one F stop you can get that lens within your budget. Sometimes a £100 tripod can get you that extra F stop at a fraction of the cost.
Still Under Construction:
You don't always have to use a macro lens, sometimes a 70-200 might be more convenient when you can't get to close to the subject. The most important parameters is depth of field and camera movement. Usually its getting the right balance a small aperture F24 might give you enough depth of field but the shutter speed drops and any slight movement the image will suffer. Usually its a balanced compromise push that ISO a little bit more than you want to, try and achieve between F11 and F16 but you will need that tripod or something solid to stop camera movement. If you have got time even use your remote or timer. Close up work often means a depth of field in a few millimetres, especially when using macro lenses. The latest image stabilization macro lenses are a big improvement for auto focus, but there are occasions when you want to manual focus but this is difficult at hand held. A better technique is to manual focus approximately then move the camera backwards or forwards to get the image sharp in focus. Remember you only have a few millimetres.
Normal "rule of thumb" that magic 1-2 hours at sun rise or sunset is when the colours and scene depth is at its best, when the sun is low down in the sky, thats when ultra violet light is at its least damaging. For landscape detail get the sun behind you, for good shadow details look at side light and for moody shots try pointing that lens against the sun. For those midday shots, forget the thought I need to get some sky in the viewfinder in quite a few situations you DON,T. Use the canopy of trees to naturally "frame" your shot or zoom in to show some unusual landscape detail.
OK.... so you want to show sky in all your landscapes, then perhaps the rule of thirds becomes more significant, 1st third foreground interest, 2nd third central subject, 3rd third hopefully that "cotton wool" cloud with blue sky.
So you can't make that early morning or late evening golden hour and you still want to shoot landscapes in the middle of the day. First thing is to install that "strong" polarizer or graduated filter and use exposure bracketing, 3 exposures at 0, -1.5, +1.5 and merge your images that should improve your landscape image.