Waterfalls

Been awhile for me to post anything here so here it is what do you all think about this photo.. any and all advice is welcome thanks in advance

You've framed it nicely but there are some issues that are hard to overcome. The dynamic range of the subject is wider than your camera can record. That means you lose detail in the highlights 9n the rocks top right and the water. If you reduce the exposure you get those back but the shadows pretty dark. The best waterfall shots are taken at dawn and dusk where you have less issues with highlights and shadows.

I think water shots in general are tough on sunny days. Best to do them either if you find something in the shade, or on cloudy days. Cloudy days aren't usually ideal for landscape photography, but in the case of water, where you are probably keeping the sky out of the photo anyway, they are actually better for water. As Gonzgolf pointed out, a lot of dynamic range for the camera to overcome.

I've also decided that either a slow shutter speed, a fifth of a second or slower, or a fast shutter speed, like a two hundredth of a second or faster, is best. In between those two the water just tends to look out of focus, versus it being obvious it was deliberately blurred at the slower shutter speed, or frozen at a fast shutter speed. That's the sort of thing you can experiment with, just do multiple shots at various speeds and review the images and see what's working.

I shoot a lot of white water, and it's tough to shoot it in direct sun if you expect to maintain detail in the less bright areas. The BEST thing you can do if you find yourself in that situation is what they call ETTR (expose to the right). In other words shoot it as bright as you can without clipping the highlights. Your camera probably has blinking indicators to show this in image review settings. While not perfectly accurate they are a good guide. You can usually get away with about one more stop of brightness beyond where you see the blinkies.

In post you will have to do some local highlight adjustments in those really bright areas, but they should still have detail. Don't bring them down too much as it would look strange for a brightly lit scene. Just enough to have some detail vs. blocked out highlights. In the shadows you will have to use a lot of shadow recovery to bring the whole scene into range.

patrick j wrote in post #19214040
I've also decided that either a slow shutter speed, a fifth of a second or slower, or a fast shutter speed, like a two hundredth of a second or faster, is best.

I agree here... to me, with the shutter speed used here, there's a disconnect between the silky motion of the water in the falls and the lack of silkiness of the water at the bottom of the photo. There should be more of a correlation between those two areas.

Independence Falls above Pelmadulla, Sri Lanka
10th April, 2021

Yes, the camera was horizontal and the trees do grow at an angle.

Hand held at 1/6 sec using good technique but whilst sat on a slippery rock without a firm foothold and knowing my Nepali friend would not be statue-still anyway. Without taking the camera away from my eye I therefore scrolled to 1/400 sec and took a second image. The result you see here is a composite of my friend's face from the second image blended with the first image. The first one was actually pretty good but the second one was sharp.