I finally got a chance to play with some daytime long exposures while on the Yosemite trip and this is one of the first images I created using my “black filter”, the B&W ND1000 10 stop neutral density filter.
Shooting with a filter this dark poses some problems, the worst of them being that you can’t see through it to focus. I found myself setting up the shot with the filter removed then locking the focus and attaching the filter prior to shooting.
Another (obvious) problem is calculating the exposure required. You may be able to use automatic modes if the light is strong enough that your calculated shutter speed stays below 30 seconds but I was shooting in manual so just figured the exposure for myself (take the meter exposure without the filter then adjust the shutter speed by doubling 10 times to find the exposure with the filter installed). Even after this, I typically had to shoot a couple of images to get the exposure exactly where I wanted it.
The final problem relates to white balance. This filter imparts a significant, warm colour cast to the image. This can be corrected pretty easily in post-processing but I learned that switching the camera to auto white balance (a setting I pretty much never use), cleans things up in the camera pretty well.
Beauty pic Dave and great explanation on using the 10 stop!
Jim Denham´s last post ..Longing Long Exposure
Thanks, Eden and Jim.
In my description, I forgot to mention that this image is a composite of 3 exposures blended using Photomatix “exposure fusion” feature.