Ok so i have started experimenting with long exposures.
Some say that long exposure images are cliché and out dated. I agree, they look
cheesy and are completely overdone. So why am i attempting them? Because i want
to! They look like fun and i have never pushed my camera to the limit of what
it can achieve, and a five minute exposure is defiantly doing that!
So first step...Buy a ND filter. So knowing nothing
about the strength of filters i bought a ND8 filter for a couple of pounds on
Ebay. Why ND8? Because it was the strongest one i could get under £5. So i went
out to the beach. Middle of the Day. Bright sunlight. ND8 Filter. Tiny
aperture. And result? Crap! The longest exposure i could achieve even at F22
with iso set to 200 was 1/60 of a Second! I was expecting to be able to just
use the Bulb feature and let the exposure run a couple of minutes. So after a
bit of intense investigation (Holding the filter up the sun and then googling
"What is the best filter for long exposures in the day" on my phone,
i discovered unless i wanted to shoot on very dull days or at dusk/dawn, i had
bought the wrong filter! I needed one that would be the equivalent of around 10
stops! Never mind, back on ebay!
To my shock a 10 stop filter is priced from around £80
up to £200! No chance of me spending that amount of money on a filter i may
only use a few times! Never mind, that's the end of that. Maybe i will just try
and shoot in the evenings or on a really dull winters day? But me being
impatient i decided i must be able to make my own. My first thought was just to
buy 2 or 3 more ND8's. Screw them together and job done. However this would
mean waiting for royal mail and i am very impatient, so solution?
I had an old pair of eclipse glasses in loft doing
nothing, maybe i could use them? BRAINWAVE! Welding Glass! It has saved my eyes
from sparks which i'm convinced are brighter than the sun many a time, surely
it would be dark enough to create long exposures on a bright day! Holding the
small piece of dark glass up to the bright sky, i could just about see the
shadow of clouds in the sky. But they were cast with green....not quite a
Neutral Density Filter! But i thought sod it, lets see what happens....
So on a bright calm windless day i took my first two
images. There were absolutely no waves in the sea, and no clouds moving
overhead, so i wasnt expecting much. To be honest, what is the point in taking
long exposure shots if there is no movement to record? But hey, i have come
this far, lets see what happens!
And just as i suspected, the result was bright green!
Completely unusable unless i desaturate the image. I'm sure i will work out a
way to recover the colour to how it should be, but for now i have created
simple and somewhat elegent images using a piece of welding glass and two
rubber bands! Ideal!
So would i buy a Quality 10 Step Filter? No! Why would
i? I know the first two images i have created aren't amazing. I have a feeling
i have lost some detail in the image due to the poor glass quality of the
'Filter', and at the moment i can only take images in black and white. But so
what? It was great fun taking these images, and i think although the images
lack any real movement and aren't particularly interesting, the technique has
potential!
Watch this space, i may soon be mastering this
technique!
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