Project 52: Week 37. Return to St Abbs with ND filter

[billtils]

The weather has been distinctly "iffy" here of late but took the opportunity to escape to relative dryness and light on Sunday, with a return visit to St Abbs. This time I checked that the tide wasn't out, and took a 6 stop ND filter - never let it be said I was not prepared to give something a try even if not entirely enthusiastic about milky water.

There were some "normal" shots in the mix, including these:

1: View from the breakwater.




2: Dive, dive, dive.




The first from the ND experimental batch - one of a rock pool at St Abbs and and two from the bay at Cove










And finally one that illustrates the most important lesson learned from the day - beware of things other than water that are in the frame and are moving (such as the people at the bottom of the frame).

[Manfred M]

Bill - what shutter speed did you shoot the images taken with the ND filter?

I've started to use in more to "settle down" the water if it is distracting to the scene, rather than going for the "milky" look that some people go for. As an aside, on use for an ND and long exposure is that it is one way of removing people from a scene. When the exposure is long enough, the people just don't show up in the image, so long as they are moving about.

[Shadowman]

Nice series.

[billtils]

The Cove ones were shot at f/18, ISO 40, 5 seconds. The rock pool was the first attempt when I was still a bit twitchy about the whole thing and was a fairly fast 0.8s but going back to your "settle down" objective, it worked quite well. I like what you say about 'settling down" the water - that makes it something with a purpose rather than a fashionable thing to do. For me, this is certainly the crawl stage of "crawl, walk, run" (and expression I learned from a Canadian).

As far as removing unwanted moving objects, I'm happy with processing a stack.

[billtils]

Thanks John.

[Manfred M]

The Cove ones were shot at f/18, ISO 40, 5 seconds. The rock pool was the first attempt when I was still a bit twitchy about the whole thing and was a fairly fast 0.8s but going back to your "settle down" objective, it worked quite well. I like what you say about 'settling down" the water - that makes it something with a purpose rather than a fashionable thing to do. For me, this is certainly the crawl stage of "crawl, walk, run" (and expression I learned from a Canadian).

As far as removing unwanted moving objects, I'm happy with processing a stack.

Thanks for the information Bill. A 5-second exposure is not particularly long and an 0.8s one hardly qualifies as long at all.

When I look at long exposures, I tend to look for two things in the final image. The first is the one I already mentioned and that is in situations where the water is an element in the image, but not necessarily the main one. I find that too much texture or specular highlights in the water can take away from the image as a whole and this is where I will "settle down" the water with exposures that can be significantly longer than what you have used. I will tend to bracket my exposures and will often take 5 or 6 different ones so that I can choose which one works best when I open the shot up in post. I'm not generally a fan of textureless water (although there are times where that is a reasonable approach) nor do I like the wispy clouds that are a side effect of long exposures. The advantage of bracketing means I can use one shot for the water and another shot for the sky and blend them in post.

Processed as a stack, one can also get some interesting water / sky / people effects without resorting to shooting with an ND filter. I guess I'm a traditionalist and prefer the filter approach.

[billtils]

Thanks for the information Bill. A 5-second exposure is not particularly long and an 0.8s one hardly qualifies as long at all.

All part of the learning process Manfred. A 6-stop ND seemed a safe place to start, but decent daylight, even at f/18, meant visiting new territory in regards to the ISO setting. It seems that the D810 is fine way down there though. I'll experiment some more and if ND looks to be something to add to the bag of tricks may get another 6-stop and see how 12 goes.

On the other hand, going back to my first reply above, it looks like 6 is fine for "settling". And a free and flexible option would be to combine modern and traditional, use the 6 stop plus bracketing and process as a stack.

Thanks for your help here.