Saturday was a fairly eventful day, photographically. After lunch, I headed to Windansea beach for some more long exposure practice.



Last time I was here, I did some long exposures at night, but since it was before I had my external shutter release, I was limited to 30 second exposures. The images needed more time, and were quite dark. I'd like to go back again at night, but I wanted to see what I could accomplish with my 10-stop ND, 6-stop ND, and polarizer.

I think I'm starting to finally get the hang of this.



Holding the shutter open past a few seconds at a time means that the moving objects look nothing like what you see live. The pounding waves turn creamy, although not in the same way that a calmer shore would look. The areas that are partially obscured by the water splashing against the rocks turns into something like mist, while the waves themselves average out to cotton candy.



The thing that takes the most practice is pre-visualization. It's easy to click the shutter enough times to get something interesting, but I tried to have an idea of what I wanted a shot to look like and then make that happen. There's plenty of time to think about these things when you've got a minute to stand behind the camera just waiting for the exposure to finish.

It took me several tries to get the water flowing down from the rocks just right. Part of it was finding the right number of seconds to leave the shutter open, but mostly it was about timing the shot just right so that the water flowed during the majority of the exposure. Otherwise, the flowing water wouldn't stay opaque.





I'm also starting to learn how to use the water as an accent to a photo, instead of the main subject. Without sharp waves, it actually helps to make the other objects stand out more, instead of competing for attention. 



One issue, however, is that neutral density filters aren't perfectly neutral across the entire visible spectrum. They pass infrared radiation, and the transition between transmitting 0.001% in the visible and >95% in the near-infrared actually begins around 650nm (deep red). At long exposures, this slight opacity loss results in an overall red cast to every shot. Adjusting white balance helps to bring things back toward neutral, but when I stacked all my filters for a total of 18.5 stop density (transmitting 0.0000026% of the incident light), the color was so red that it wasn't possible to bring it back to natural. The color shift is easily seen in color-neutral objects, like clouds and white walls. Setting them to be perfectly neutral made the rest of the scene unnaturally cyan. I decided that slightly wamr clouds looked better than slightly cool sand.

It did mean that I was able to make exposures as long as I wanted at that point. without a filter, a change from f/8 to f/11 might mean doubling the shutter speed from 1/125s to 1/60s. With all that neutral density on the lens, though, stopping the lens down one stop could mean going from 4 minutes to 8 minutes. That's some serious water-smoothing ability right there, but I didn't have the patience for that since I was trying to explore more manageable shutter speeds. I tried a few 4 minute exposures, but most were in the 10-30 second range.



Since it was a pretty windy and cloudy day, that gave me another moving object to play with.



Clouds are actually a bit easier to work with since they move in a more predictable way, and I could decide well in advance where I wanted them to appear in the shot. Waves are much quicker and one wave might travel further up the shore than the one before or after it.


Luckily, these clouds moved faster than the big, puffy ones to the north, which are in some of the shots above. The further away the clouds, the slower their apparent speed, which made clouds directly overhead streak by, while still being able to see sharp clouds in the distance.