K-5 and Waterfalls

confused by the comment about the light strip being distracting..?

that comment was likely made with no regard to aperture. with same overall exposure or brightness of the image (so any mix and match of shutter/aperture//ISO you may have used), the rocks in the upper left would be distracting. the rock and the white water are bright and just catch the eye.

i was going to suggest a polarizer, if you have one. it might help with the glare on the pool of water. they also reduce exposure by about 2 stops. so, you would then be at f/11.

if you don't have a polarizer but do have software that allows 'highlight' recovery on an adjustment layer (like LR 4 & 5 as well as others), maybe select the water and try playing with the 'highlight' slider. well, this will only, maybe, work if you used RAW.

as far as f/22...
no, not so good really. i have sometimes used f/13. f/11 is better.
did you shoot JPG or RAW? if you shot JPG, you might be able to take that same shot at f/13 (more light) but then be able to 'recover' the 1-stop overexposure in software...

Perhaps you shot JPG, though... i see ISO was 200
typically, you would want to set that for 80 and then you could have used f/13 with the same result. i guess JPG, though, with highlight recovery on? I think limits minimum ISO to 200..? However, using JPG, highlight recovery was a reasonable choice.

if RAW, ISO 200 isn't a good choice and highlight recovery don't help with RAW images, anyway.

so, for technical recommendations, i might try polarizer (if you have one) or playing with 'highlight' slider on a selection of water only. it is best to use RAW for things like this (if you have software to work with it and care to try) and, with RAW, use ISO 80.

If you don't want RAW, there is a way to use multiple exposure in camera to blend together the separate images and give one final image with whatever exposure you chose. Actually, the camera will blend RAW for you as well..  Anyway, the benefit is that his can help in place of or in addition ND filters... Proper use of ND filter is better, but I used this technique with RAW and it works okay. Here is a thread to get you started, if interested: http://www.dpreview.com/forums/thread/2795453#forum-post-35188423

It is about K20 but a comment mentions it works similarly for K7 so should for K5 as well.  I used the technique with K20 but do other things now.  There are other threads about this mufti-exposure technique as well.