ND filter

Silent sea

landscapes, Personal Pictures

Image taken on a trip with my ‘landscape photography’ class, a couple of weeks ago.

In between tuition moments, I get to snap an image here and there.

 

Silent Sea

Ludwig Desmet_capgriznez-01

135mm at f11 – 30sec.

Image taken with Canon 5D II and Canon 135mm f2.0 L

Taken with a ND1000 (10stops) filter from B+W and converted to black and white in Lightroom. I only have a 10stops screw filter for 77mm lens diameters (for my Canon 17-40mm f4), the 135mm has a 72mm diameter filter thread. I simply positioned the filter in the back of the lens shade, worked fine, don’t tell anybody. 😉

The image depicts old mussel growing poles. they get floated at high tides, become apparent at low tides. taken a little east from Cap-Griz-Nez

 

thank you for watching.

North Sea

landscapes, Personal Pictures, personal tips & tricks, Tips and Tricks

Hi,
long time since I posted some new images. I have been busy preparing the two exhibitions and that is now over, with the last exhibition opening this saturday evening. You are still very welcome to come visit the exhibition. (wednesday, saturday and sunday from 14:00 h till 18:00 h. in ‘de Oude Brouwerij’ Ronse.)

I have been to the North sea on april 22nd, and I wanted to show you some images I brought with me. I have further experimented with the ND Grey filters, I used them before in Calais/Cap-Griz-Nez too.
Here I used only the ND 1000 filter, which blocks about 8 stops of light, and let’s pass only 1/1000th of the light. This allows for long exposure times in plain daylight.

The technique is quite simple: you setup your tripod (best a good sturdy one, because when the sea surface is coming over the breakwater, you get some nasty winds blowing you almost out of your clothes.) and make your best composition possible. Verify your normal exposure. Now without further touching your camera, switch to manual focus if not already done, screw on your ND filter and calculate your new exposure time. In my situation, I had to lengthen the exposer time x1000. E.g. 1/100 sec without filter became 10 seconds with filter.
Then wait for the sea tide to come up. Get cold, try to protect your camera from waves splattering on the rocks, almost get blown over, get wet feet, get a rain shower on your head, and then decide you tried your best and try to find some shelter.

All images taken with 17-40 mm on Canon 5D mark II, exposure times of about 50-60 seconds. Aperture f1/16 up to f1/22. The first shot is composed out of 4 exposures, I converted the images to BW in Lightroom, then added a blue’isch color cast in Photoshop.

Hope you liked them, click for bigger version!

ludwig

ND filters

personal tips & tricks, Tips and Tricks

Hi,
I bought 2 neutral density gray filters some weeks ago. I would like to show you some results.
ND filters are used to take away light from the scene, to a certain amount.
There are two different types of ND filters on the market: fixed stop value filters, and variable filters. The latter work with two polarizing filters rotating over each other, and they have a stopped down value between 3 and 8 stops. The fixed value filters consist in a single sheet of shaded gray plastic or glass or whatever. The Polarizing filters version has the advantage that you can vary the number of stops of light blocked, they have the disadvantage that they create an interference pattern when used at the darkest setting (showing as a darker cross in your image, especially when used with wide angle lenses on a full frame body)
I have bought a 3 stops (also called 8x because it allows only 1/8th of the light to pass) and a 10 stops (also called 1000x) ND filter, for my 17-40 mm wide angle lens.

a 1000x ND filter blocks 999/1000 of the light, this makes it possible to use long exposure times in full daylight. The examples below are from 20-80 seconds for the exterior images, 400 seconds for the interior images. This makes all moving subjects fade away, to the point of becoming invisible if they do not halt during the exposure time. I have taken images of a crowded train station hall (Gent St.-Pieters) a very crowded shopping street (Gent Veldstraat), the E40 Highway on a very busy day, … without moving subjects visible.
One remark, the 1000x ND filter creates a lot of vignetting and a white balance shift towards red, I’m not sure if this is a typical ND filter thing or specific for the ones I got.
I also joined two images without the use of the ND filter, to make obvious what the effect is. Click for full size!