Photographing Hidden Waterfalls After Heavy Rain

Rain is the best thing that can happen to a waterfall

In dry weather, most of Britain's hidden falls are little more than a damp streak on a rock face — a seep, a trickle, a dark stain you'd walk past without a second glance. Then a front comes in off the Atlantic, drops 40mm in a night, and the same gully turns into a thundering white curtain. The small unnamed cascades you find on the map are often the best value of all, because nobody else is standing in front of them with a tripod.

The trick is timing. Small catchments — a Cumbrian ghyll, a Peak District clough, a hillside beck — fill and drain fast. They'll peak within a few hours of the rain stopping and be back to normal in twelve. Bigger systems in Eryri or the western Highlands hold their water for a day or two, so a shoot the morning after a wet night often hits them perfectly. Go while the river is still falling: you get the volume without the brown, peat-stained flood colour.

What to carry for wet-weather waterfall work

Everything below earns its place in the pack. Waterfall photography in spate conditions is a damp, cold, fiddly business, and kit that fails in the wet ends the day early.

• A circular polarising filter — the single most useful accessory. It cuts the glare coming off wet rock and foliage, letting the greens and greys actually read as colour.
• A 6-stop neutral density filter — optional in summer, near-essential in winter gloom when even f/16 at ISO 100 gives you a shutter speed too fast to blur water properly.
• Three or four microfibre cloths, one of them kept completely dry in a zipped pocket for the front element only.
• A rocket blower, so you can shift grit before you wipe. Rubbing a grain of slate across a filter is how afternoons get ruined.
• A deep lens hood and a small towel you don't mind sacrificing. Draped over the top of the hood, it keeps most of the spray off the glass.
• Boots with deep lugs and a walking pole — the pole gives you three points of contact on greasy rock, which matters more than any camera setting.
• A head torch and a dry spare layer in a dry bag. Valley floors go dark early, and wet walkers cool down fast.

Getting the water right: colour, texture, exposure

White water is the brightest thing in almost any woodland scene, and it will happily blow out while you're busy admiring the composition. Meter for the fall itself, then pull back about two-thirds of a stop so the highlights sit just short of clipping. Watch the same area in every frame — the moment the water loses all detail it looks like painted plaster.

Shutter speed decides the character of the shot. Roughly 1/250s freezes individual droplets and droplets only exist for a fraction of a second, so you usually get grey mush; 1/60s to 1/15s holds some structure and motion; between half a second and two seconds gives the familiar silky ribbon; beyond about four seconds it flattens into a smooth, slightly lifeless veil, especially if there's leaf litter or foam in the flow. In spate, err towards the shorter end — fast water has enough movement that you don't need long exposures to convey it.

Focus on a rock, not the water. Autofocus systems hunt badly on moving white. Pick a wet boulder in the mid-ground, focus there with a single point or in manual with magnification, then stop down to f/11 or f/16. And rotate that polariser with purpose: turn it to kill the sheen on a wet slab and you'll reveal its colour, but leave a little reflection on some rocks and the surface looks wet rather than dusty.

Keeping the lens dry when the air itself is wet

Standing within three metres of a fall in spate, the whole atmosphere is a fine mist that settles on glass within seconds. Always shoot with a filter fitted so the spray lands on something cheap and replaceable rather than your front element. Blow before you wipe, wipe in one direction with a dry part of the cloth, and never reuse a damp cloth on the lens.

Change lenses only in the car, a bothy, or a dry bag with your body shielding the mount. A camera that's been out in the cold will fog instantly when you bring it into a warm car, so bag it first and let it come up to temperature slowly. If the worst happens, a night beside a radiator with the lens off and a sachet of silica inside the bag sorts most minor moisture.

Finding falls that aren't on the postcards

Ordnance Survey 1:25,000 mapping is your treasure map. Look for contour lines bunching into a tight V with a blue line running through it — that's a steep drop on a stream, and if there's no path to it, so much the better. Names give the game away too: force in the north of England, spout and linn in the Borders and Scotland, sgwd in Wales.

Follow tributaries uphill rather than the main river. The celebrated fall gets the crowds; the side stream two hundred metres along the contour often has something better, entirely to yourself. Woodland ghylls are the richest hunting ground — shade keeps the moss green and the exposures long. Check access before you go: most upland streams sit on open access land, but lowland woods and estate ghylls are frequently private, and a polite word at the farm gate costs nothing.

Staying upright and coming home dry

The rocks at the base of a fall are the most dangerous surface in British hillwalking. Constant spray grows an algal film that behaves exactly like ice, and water-polished slabs offer nothing for a boot edge to bite on. If a rock looks dark and glossy, test it with a toe before you commit your weight, and keep the tripod legs on dry, rough ground wherever possible. Be just as careful at the lip: people fall from the top of waterfalls far more often than from the bottom, and wet, undercut edges give way without warning.

Watch the water, not just the light. Rain falling ten miles upstream can send a spate down a narrow catchment within an hour, and a crossing that was ankle-deep on the way out may be thigh-deep and pushy on the way back. Never wade anything fast above knee height, always plan an escape route up and over rather than back through, and check public river-level gauges for your catchment before you set off.

Finally, tell someone where you're going and when you'll be back. Mobile signal dies in most ghylls, so a text from the car park before you drop in is the last chance you'll get. With a dry cloth, a polariser and a bit of patience, a wet Tuesday in November will give you photographs no summer visit ever could.