Chasing the light….

The Cralwey boatshed sitting on Matilda bay on Perth’s Swan River is one of the world’s most recognisable boatsheds. It’s not hard to see why lying only a 5 minute drive from Perth CBD and with it’s stunning long jetty and distinctive blue paint job, it certainly is a beautiful old building.

This was the first time that I’ve whipped out my new Lee Big Stopper Filter (ten stop filter) for a whirl.

What is a ten stop filter?

In photography, a neutral density filter or ND filter it typically colourless (grey filter). The idea of neutral density filter  is to reduces and/or modifies intensity of all wavelengths of light equally, giving the photographer the ability to use longer exposures. The purpose of standard photographic neutral density filters is to allow the photographer greater flexibility to change the aperture and exposure to blur the subject in different situations and conditions.

So how is it used?

Well no better way than to use an example. While at the Crawley Boatshed, I really wanted to place emphasis on the jetty and boatshed by smoothing out the water and blurring the clouds. The premise behind smoothing out the water and blurring the clouds was to use the jetty as a leading line so your eye follows the jetty to the boatshed without any distracting waves in the water or big storm clouds hovering over the boatshed,  giving the image a real ethereal and ambient quality.

The shot itself was taken on a gloomy and overcast day at about 1pm. Typically when shooting during the middle of the day, there is little flexibility in terms of taking longer exposure images. Enter the Lee Big Stopper.

I composed the shot and took a light meter reading off the boatshed itself. Without the ND filter, the shot itself would have been taken at 1/30th of a second at f/11. If I had shot the image at 1/30th of a second there would be no movement in either the water nor the clouds. However, with the Lee Big Stopper filter attached to my camera, I was able to slow down the shutter speed to 30 seconds… This in turn have me the flexibility to smooth out the water and blur the clouds. Thankfully the Lee comes with an easy to use exposure table, meaning it as easy for my to calculate that 30 seconds was the ideal exposure time.

How did I use the Filter?

I followed the easy to follow guide posted by landscape photographer (and friend) Lee Duguid. Please check out his post here.

Even before I put the ND filter on I followed these steps:

• I put my camera on my tripod (as I always do for my landscape shots). With the ND filter on,  I am next to always  going to be shooting upwards of 5-10 seconds so this is imperative.
• I composed the shot,  I knew exactly how I wanted to frame the shot with motion blur including both clouds and the water (but this could be done for traffic or crowds). I would suggest to try to shoot something stationary and use the motion blur as a secondary effect to really make the image pop.
• I set focus and switch to manual (auto focus wouldn’t work through the filter as it’s almost black!).
• I set the white balance (again, the camera has no chance once the filter is on).  Given that it was cloudy I used my camera’s pre-set cloud WB (but please note I also colour managed the image in post-processing)
• I correctly exposed the scene, setting the aperture and shutter speed (for the scene without the filter at this stage).
• I took a couple of  test shots and checked histogram and tweaked the settings until I was happy.

I then put the filter on (being careful not to change the focus on my lens!)

• I stopped down the exposure 10 stops (from 1/30th to 30 seconds using the exposure table that came with the filter)
• I took the above image. Easy as 1-2-3.