Make water look wet

[Daniel Unkefer]

Ludlow Falls 1980s 4x5 Norma 90mm F8 SA by Nokton48, on Flickr

Ludlow Falls 1980s 4x5 Norma 90mm F8 Super Angulon HP5 D76 1:1 fiber 8x10 print Fortezo Dektol Omega DII Omegalite

[Thad Gerheim]

AA's teaching darkroom in Yosemite had a teaching aid with photos of a vigorously flowing stream, taken at different shutter speeds. I thought the photo that really looked like water with a sense of movement was 1/60th. Everybody else in the class agreed. Not the most popular LF shutter speed to be sure...

I've either been told or read somewhere that the human eye sees at about 1/60th a second and photos taken at that speed will look more natural to us. It might have been Bruce Barlow that told me that.

[bmikiten]

We tested this one year in a class I taught at a local art center. We shot with a 6x6 camera and used a little stream outside as our subject. There were two things we discovered - shooting at 1/30 - 1/125th was optimal but more importantly the angle of light and the ability to provide spectral highlights really made the water "wet". Since that day, I pay very close attention to the reflections. On a similar note, we had one visiting artist who shot everything at long shutter speeds because he believed it made the water look like it had muscles. To each their own.

[ic-racer]

This one looks 'wet' to me. A good combination of sharp and blurry elements.

4x5, 210mm Horseman Topcor, f22. Printed 16x20 on Ilford MG paper.

[Graham Patterson]

Transparency helps a lot, as do specular highlights. Water in a thin layer over a rock often looks wetter than a deep pool for this reason. Multiple exposures at a faster shutter speed often look wetter than a single slow one because it captures more droplets and highlights.

One of the wettest appearing things I ever saw was a sheet of black ice. It certainly was not wet, it just looked 'wetter than wet'!

[eric black]

In color work I tend to do water pics with non-matte printing material- sometimes the glossier the better. The glossier medium seems to fit the reflective subject matter better in most of the cases where I have printed water-based images.

[Vaughn]

More of an attempt to make water look like light...

11x14 Sliver gelatin contact print

[Pieter]

Tough one. What water are you talking about? The choppy waves of the sea? The curling surf with spray trailing the waves? Crashing water agains rocks? Slow-moving shallow water? Rain? Water droplets on a blade of grass or a window? So many different ways to approach it and so many places you will find water. I personally get tired really fast of long-exposure water: it doesn't look like water, it doesn't look wet, it looks like an affectation.

[Vaughn]

At the same time, having spent a lot of my life studying the flow of water (okay...just hanging out along water), I have noticed that moving water is moving. Stopping (freezing it, so to speak), must be an affectation, also. "We stop it because we can."

TC's image works -- especially contrasting water with rock.

Below: Merced River. A long exposure, but the movement is only seen by the streaks of floating bubbles. What speaks of wet water more than a reflection? Transparency also.

[Pieter]

At the same time, having spent a lot of my life studying the flow of water (okay...just hanging out along water), I have noticed that moving water is moving. Stopping (freezing it, so to speak), must be an affectation, also. "We stop it because we can."

TC's image works -- especially contrasting water with rock.

Stopping water looks more like what I see than a sheet of flat grey that is produced by long exposures. Personal taste.