Brrrrr-ridalveil Falls

One of the cool things about shooting waterfalls in the Winter is you get all the frozen ice that coats the rocks. This really adds some nice texture to what is already there.

This is Bridalveil Falls, at Yosemite National Park. There is some flow to this waterfall, this time of year, but nothing like it is, during the Spring. Still, it is not a bad flow.

I decided on a landscape composition for this photo, instead of the common portrait or vertical composition, which is typical, for long and thin waterfalls, like this one is. I know. I can hear it now. "You cut the waterfall off!" Well...so what! You do not always have to show the waterfall from the top or show where it lands. I did neither in this case. It creates an illusion that the waterfall is even longer.

By composing this way, I was able to zoom in closer, to concentrate on what is important. In this photo, it is the white icy rocks that surround the waterfall. The landscape composition also gives me a better immediate foreground. If you have been to these falls before, you know how cluttered the foreground can be here. One solution would be to walk the rocks some and get closer to the falls. In this case, it was very icy and a struggle just to walk to this spot, on the asphalt path. No way was I going to navigate the icy rocks. I also think this composition is a fresh look at the falls, which is not so common. I like that. Lastly, by really seeing the icy rocks closer around the falls, you can get a good sense of how cold it was, which is important to convey the seasons of Yosemite. Brrrrrrrr!