Waterfalls Wall Art

Waterfall Wall Art: Tall or Wide

Most waterfalls want a portrait format, for an obvious reason: the subject is water falling, so the picture is about vertical distance. A tall crop shows the drop from lip to plunge pool and lets the eye travel the way the water does. Squeeze the same fall into a wide frame and you get a lot of rock and foliage either side of a white stripe, which describes the setting rather than the fall.

Wide formats earn their place with a specific kind of fall. Broad curtain falls, terraced cascades and multi-channel drops are genuinely horizontal events, and a landscape crop is the honest way to show them. The test is simple: if the water is wider than it is tall in life, buy it wide.

Portrait pieces bring a practical advantage in the average house, because tall narrow wall space is easier to find than wide unbroken wall space. Chimney breasts, the wall beside a door, the run above a radiator and the space at the turn of a staircase all take a vertical image comfortably, and a stairwell suits a waterfall particularly well — you climb alongside it.

Shutter speed is the other choice, and it does more to how the image feels than orientation does. Long exposures turn water into smooth silk, calm and slightly unreal; faster captures freeze the spray and keep the noise and violence of the thing. Silk suits bedrooms and bathrooms; frozen spray suits a room where you want energy. Weak examples show themselves where smoothed water meets rock, with a soft grey blur instead of a defined edge.

Hang a tall waterfall lower than you would hang a landscape. The natural reading point is the top of the drop, and if that sits above your eye line the whole image tips away from you. Set the top of the fall at roughly standing eye height and the piece settles.