McGee Creek in the Fall

I really like how the water's color turned out. Very nice.

i can spend hours in these little places, very nice

Magical….awesome shot 🙂

Wonderful and breath taking.

Beautiful and very breathtaking.

+Jacob Law On the right side the yellow streaks in the water are aspen leaves coming down the stream…

awsome shot, those leaves almost look like a long narrow rock. 🙂

W O W

good………

Wow! Divinely beautiful!

good

I don't have the file or EXIF handy +James Kuhn, but in this situation I'd tend to set a fixed aperture, whatever works in the f/11 to f/22 range to enable me to bracket exposure and end up with times in the 0.8 to 2.5 second range.  Not exactly… if it's 0.5 or 3.0 seconds that's fine, the point is to have a number of exposure times to choose from later.  The exposure bracketing would be set to 2/3 to 1 stop.  That's close enough to 0EV that the exposure can and will be adjusted in post-processing later.  This is very different from the way film shooters used to shoot.  With each click of the shutter costing $1 or so, they'd try to nail the exposure and guesstimate exactly how much motion blur they'd get days later when they looked at the negative or print.  

Most casual, amateur film shooters also didn't have darkrooms, so the exposure had to be dead on.  With digital photography, anyone can make adjustments to exposure with free Picasa software, or Photoshop Elements running around $79 or Lightroom at $149, so exact exposure becomes far less important or useful compared to other considerations.  Digital shooters can intentionally give themselves more options to choose from, such as exposures with a range of motion blur in this example.

Note: some photo contests look at EXIF and disqualify entries which they determine used automated features like Automatic Exposure Bracketing.  Bear in mind that for the most part, the well known leaders in this industry and their habits are rooted in the old analog film days, and they value and practice things which made sense on film.  Either they haven't quite fully grasped yet how digital photography workflow and economics encourage new practices on the exposure side of the process, or they simply want to strictly enforce habits which favor their background and experience.  

It's entirely up to the photographer.  Some photographers bracket manually to keep their images eligible for contests.  Personally, at that point I think it's all getting very silly.  I shoot for photography, for the results, not some clueless fossil's judgmental belief of what's the "right" way to do the exact same thing (in case you can't tell, I have a strong negative reaction to controlling, self-righteous people).  I'd rather capture the three exposures without touching the camera so I can do whatever I want with the exposures later (layers, HDR, etc) without creating registration issues between exposures.  I also want to do it in 5 seconds so I can get as many different compositions as possible, and not waste the best sunset light.  In the mountains where weather and light is changing really fast, the best light sometimes lasts 30-60 seconds… or less.  Seriously, I wonder sometimes if the people making these sorts of arbitrary rules really ever get out and shoot much.  Screw those contests; I'm in this for the light, and it doesn't wait for foolish and counterproductive practices.

Gorgeous! !!! Wow, what an Eye for Beauty you have …..