Exposure question

L

lister

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I've seen lots of beach pictures where a slow shutter has been used to create a fluffy, (sorry couldn't think of a better word), looking sea. I tried this but ended up with over exposed sky due to the speed.

Do people use ND filters when shooting this or is there some other method involved
 
ab2012 said:
what's a 10 stop? :(
Click to expand...

And when you get to Kings Cross... ;)

A 'stop ' is any halving or doubling of the exposure. Eg, 1/125 sec to 1/250sec is a stop of shutter speed; f/4 to f/5.6 is a stop of lens aperture (x1.4, square root of two, for f/numbers to double them, just to confuse you), ISO200 to 400 is one stop.

So ten stops is one, x2, x4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024 - doubling each time. Put that another way, a ten stop filter reduces the light passed to 1/1024th, roughly one thousanth. It's very dark, similar to welding mask glass (which some people use for this).
 
Thanks,Richard.
I've now made it to the Gare du Nord :)
 
lister said:
I've seen lots of beach pictures where a slow shutter has been used to create a fluffy, (sorry couldn't think of a better word), looking sea. I tried this but ended up with over exposed sky due to the speed.

Do people use ND filters when shooting this or is there some other method involved
Click to expand...

This is why I bought a slot-in 10Stop ND filter. You can then slot-in a Graduated ND filter to control the sky.

Ok its a Lee Big stopper, its expensive and there is a 12week lead time but I couldn't see a simple way of doing long exposures and controlling the sky.

Yeah you can bracket and blend or even try and hold a GND filter inplace but these exposures are often +30secs.

There is the expense of the filter holder and lens adaptor(s) so its not the cheapest method for sure.

You might also be able to get the sky back from the single RAW file. I've used a software blend where I would process the image as desired, then using the same RAW, drop the exposure slider down and process that image. Now I have two images one for the sky (assuming not totally blown) and the original, then a blend/grad mask in GIMP.
 
Graduated ND filter to reduce exposure of the sky.

If you have a programme such as Lightroom you can apply a virtual graduated ND filter to your image to achieve the same effect. Not as good, but handy if you've already taken the pictures, don't have an ND filter, left them at home, etc.
 
Actually,while software can compensate for some exposure, i have found that exposing wi an nd or nd grad give better results in any case. Though whay you can do to create some sort of effect like a 10 stop on a photo is to create a black layer in photoshop and use the overlay to adjust. IMHO this gives a much better result than LR or even APERTURE.

//v
 
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