05.17
I headed down to the Squids Ink jetty for tonight’s sunset. There was a few members from a local Flickr group having a little meet up down there for a bit of sunset action.
It wasn’t a bad sunset at all, some nice clouds in the sky and the colours were okay. I’ve seen better colours there but I’m happy with the shots i got out of tonight. I even remembered to bring the batteries for my camera today.
All of these images are shot with a 5D Mark II and the 17-40mm f/4L lens. This first one with the sun in the frame was shot using my new ND400 (about 9 stop) filter. There were two exposures which make up this final image. My typical landscape technique to merge separate exposure for the sky and the foreground makes this image which otherwise would not be possible due to the limited dynamic range of modern digital cameras. The foreground was exposed at 15s and the sky at 4s, about 2 stops in between.
This one below is probably my favourite from the evening. I love this time of the evening, about half an hour or so after sunset. The blues in the skies always come up so well without too much post-processing. If you look very carefully you can see the light trail of a pelican moving across the frame.
This was roughly a 100s bulb exposure, f/8 at ISO 200. The 100s (or longer) exposure time makes the water a lot smoother and also allows the cloud movement to show in the image, giving it a final touch.
Just a tip, always bring a stopwatch when planning to do exposures like this. Most cameras can only dial in 30s shutter speeds, anything more you need to use “bulb” mode with a remote release cord. This is when you manually engage and disengage the shutter by hand. So you need to manually time it by hand (with a stopwatch). There are a few cameras such as Canon 1-series DSLRs which have built-in timer which counts up on the top LCD display during bulb mode. But from my understanding most consumer/prosumer models don’t have this feature.
If you like this article, let me know and I’ll do more next time 
Until next time…
Hey Andy,
Thanks for this blog – I for one think it’s very useful and informative.
Question about longer exposures for you. I understand the need to time the exposure when in bulb mode, and this is probably a question that cannot really be answered…but how does one know how long to expose for? Trial and error? A formula based on light metering?
I’m always impressed when photographers tell me “so I opened it up for a 100 second exposure and …”, but then I wonder how on earth they knew it had to be 100 seconds (or any other figure).
Cheers,
David.
Hey David,
There are several ways you can do it. But basically i meter the scene with no filter, work out what shutter speed i need, then multiply it by 400 (for ND400) to find the exposure i need. For example if i meter and find out i need 1/400th with no filter, then this means i can shoot 1/400 * 400 = 1 second with the ND400. Or say i meter 1/8s, then with the ND400 this means 1/8*400 = 50 seconds. I carry a cheat sheet i made myself which basically has a table of these calculations for different NDs.
You can do this by taking the filter on and off the lens, you have to do this when it gets dark, i.e when exposures are over 1min, since otherwise it is too dark to compose or see anything through the viewfinder or even live view. But when its brighter i can see okay, i use a 2nd camera to do the metering for me, this way i don’t need to keep unmount/remounting the filter.
Regards,
Andy
Hi Andy,
For a photographer of more limited means (I don’t have a second camera to use exclusively for metering!), would you recommend I meter both the sky and the water before composing my shot for multiple exposures? Depending on the length of the first exposure, do you think this would be sufficient or do I really need to take a fresh meter reading?
I guess I need to experiment.
Thanks Andy!
Hey David,
It depends on the time of the day, and ambient lighting in general, whether it is changing significantly enough. I’ve had situations where i’ve metered and calculated the 2 exposures and just gone ahead and done it with no problems. But then sometimes (often in the evening, when light levels are changing rapidly), the light can change enough with the long exposures, that sometimes by the second exposure, your previously calculated reading is already a full stop or two out. I must confess sometimes i carry a hand held light meter which shows me the EV readings which i can keep track of. But as a general rule, not so much during the day, but at the end (or start) of the day, yes you should re-meter.
Another way to quickly ‘re-meter’ is to take a test shot without taking filter off and wasting time and bumping your camera’s position, change up your ISO to an extremely high value and shorten your shutter speed down by the same no. of stops, check histogram, make adjustment and go back to low ISOs for another long exposure.
Andy