Andy Gock

I had a wander down to Merewether Baths tonight to shoot some landscapes. Even though i have shot this area a few times in the past, i was looking for something different.

Now here is a funny story (or not so funny), i usually take two cameras with me when shooting landscapes, a 5D Mark II and a 1Ds. Today i left in such a hurry that i left my 5D Mark II battery on the charger, i.e left home without it.  Such is the case, i was forced to use the 1Ds. It isn’t a bad camera at all, but it isn’t all that great for long exposures, say over 20s since it generates a *lot* of noise. Dark frame subtraction (or in camera noise reduction) works pretty well to reduce it, but i had to disable it since it was taking too long. It does matter when you are taking exposures of over 2 mins at times.

Anyway, i was armed with a ND400 filter i only purchased recently and i wanted to have a play around with, and i was able to grab a few nice shots. A fair bit of post processing was required to remove the noise, but i think it was worth it. Obviously it would have been nicer to have the 5D II working, but hey it ain’t so bad really.

The shot above was a 2 exposure blend. One shot exposed for the sky, and one for the foreground. The two exposures were then loaded into Photoshop as separate layers and layer mask (with black to white gradient) used to blend the two layers together. This has a similar effect to using a ND grad filter. In fact an ND grad filter would be better as you could get the properly exposed result straight away, straight from the camera. I don’t actually own an appropriately sized ND grad filter though. They can be a bit hard to use with ultra wide angle lenses like the 17-40mm i am using here.

The one below was single exposure only.

This last shot, was later in the evening. There was not much light left, so the ND400 was swapped out and a ND8 was used. These ND* filters are really useful as it lets you use a lot longer exposure time, giving a smoother nature to the water (which i like). Without the ND filters the only other way to have these long exposures is to stop down to something ridiculous like f/22 or the like, which will give you soft (i.e not sharp) images due to diffraction. This image was from a single exposure, about 100 seconds at f/9. There was enough headroom in the RAW file obtain all the details, this isn’t always the case but it was this time. Keep in mind, you don’t always know that you have enough headroom, so to be safe i did take a 2nd exposure, but i didn’t need to use the  second one.

So there you have it folks. If you like reading this behind the scenes news and tutorials, please be sure to leave a comment here, and I’ll try and post a bit more stuff in the future. This is the first time i have put together a blog, so i really have no idea if people are interested in reading it or not!