I'm just back from a wee trip to Edinburgh, where I attended the wedding of my very good friend Alan Tominey to his beautiful wife Agnes. The wedding itself was beautiful but the weather was absolutely minging for the whole weekend. I believe this to be a direct consequence of the following equation:
Summer + Scotland + Wedding = Rain
While inclement weather and dark skies may not be ideal for wedding portraits, they do suit a certain style of landscape photography...
As a photographer who is, at best, a dabbler in landscape photography, I often think of it as an incredibly complex and hugely labour intensive endeavour. The thought of waking up at 3am and ascending a mountain in complete darkness, bearing a 4x5 camera and Sherpa-load of other equipment fills me with dread!
The above image, on the other hand, was taken yesterday morning at about 11am. I was maybe 5 minutes walk from the car and had nothing more than the D700, a tripod, two prime lenses and a 1000x neutral density filter.
The 'big stopper', as it's sometimes known, is the key to this image. I was shooting at f/16 and iso 200. Before attaching the filter, and with the camera set to aperture priority mode, a shutter speed of 1/40th was required. The resulting image was ok.
However a 1000x neutral density filter absolutely kills the light hitting the sensor and gave me shutter speeds of between 30 seconds and a minute. The long exposure completely transforms the appearance of the water. I think it looks like brushed aluminium, which is kinda cool for an image with all that iron and concrete anyway.
In terms of post-processing, things were again very simple. A few cheeky adjustments in Adobe Camera Raw and a bit of sharpening, micro-contrast and a black and white conversion in Photoshop. Couldn't be easier.
Below are a couple of tips for using strong ND filters. I would also recommend the work of two photographers, who really take this style of photography to the next level; Rohan Reilly and Arkadius Zagrabski.
With the ability to produce interesting photos in rubbish weather, I think I've discovered the antidote to a manky British summer. Expect to see more of these in the coming months :)
Thanks for looking!
Sean
Images © Sean Afnan 2012, all rights reserved
10 quick tips for long exposures using a ND filter (mine is a B+W ND 110)
1. Pick a cloudy day or shoot at sunrise or sunset - even a 10 stop ND filter will struggle to generate long exposures at midday with the sun in the sky
2. Look for scenes with moving elements. Waterfalls and beaches are always winners. If it's windy, or if you can really stretch out your exposure, motion blur in clouds looks absolutely amazing
3. Stick your camera on a tripod
4. Compose and focus your image, making sure everything is locked down tight. If you have one, use the camera's virtual horizon to get everything level
5. Attach the filter at this point (when you're absolutely sure you don't need to look through the viewfinder)
6. Ignore the camera's light meter. You can either calculate the exposure by adding ten stops of light to whatever your camera gives you before you attack the filter or just guesstimate and using trial and error and checking the histogram
7. Exposure bracketing helps if you have scenes with very high contrast and you don't mind HDRing it up in post
8. Use a cable to release the shutter. Even with long exposures, you want to avoid camera shake as much as possible
9. Close or cover the viewfinder. VERY IMPORTANT! With such long exposures, the chance of light entering your camera via the viewfinder increases. This is a particular risk if the sun is over your shoulder. Why is this important? If you have enough light coming through the viewfinder, bouncing off the mirror or the back of the filter, and hitting the sensor, you'll get a contaminated image. This can manifest itself in a number of ways - hot spots, weird colour casts, hazy bits, and so on. Sometimes this can be very subtle and you might not notice until you get back home. Always cover the viewfinder before you release the shutter.
10. Digital camera sensors get quite hot during long exposures. This will introduce noise to the resulting images. While this can be a bit of a pain, the noise that is generated is quite predictable. I always turn on 'long exp. nr' in camera. What this does is tell the camera to create a 'dark frame'. A dark frame is an image that is made over exactly the same period as the previous exposure but with the shutter closed. A 90 second exposure will be followed by a 90 second period where Nikon users are greeted with the message 'job nr' flashing on the lcd information screen. The camera then reads the noise pattern from the dark frame and literally subtracts the noise from your image. Sound complicated? The only thing you need to worry about is turning on 'long exp. nr', and making sure that you don't switch off your camera while the dark frame is being created.
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