Blue Hour Water – using a ND filter


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Blue Hour Water - using a ND filterThis could look like ice, but it isn't, it is a long exposure of water on a fairly windy day. It's in a narrow bay, the waves don't get big, but they had a little white foam on top. I took this photo using a tripod and because it was very windy, I dug the leggs into the sand on the beach. Otherwise the camera wasn't steady enough for a long exposure.But how to get a long exposure of 20 seconds around sunset? I did three things:1) First of all I turned the ISO down to 100. If I had shot it at ISO 200, the exposure time would have been cut in half to 10 seconds, and at ISO 400 only 5 seconds. So to maximize the exposure time I set it to the lowest ISO I could, which was ISO 100. 2) Then I also set the f-stop low (remember that low f-stops are high values) - I had it at f/16. Had I shot it at f/4, which is the highest f-stop the lens will go to, I would also have cut the shutter speed in half a few times. That's why you call a lens that has a very high f-stop like f/2.8 or maybe even f/1.4 a fast lens, because it gives shorter shutter times.3) The last and equally important step was that I attached a Neutral Density Filter (ND filter) to the lens. A ND-filter is like a pair of sunglasses that blocks the light. ND-filters comes in different flavors that are more or less dark. In this case I attached a ND density filter that stopped down the light two full Exposure Value Steps. Or in plain english it doubled the shutter speed twice, which brought the shutter speed from 5 seconds to 20 seconds.And that is how I made the water look this way. It came as surprise to myself, that it looked like ice, I had anticipated a smokey look on the water. But I guess it comes from the fact, that it is shot in the blue hour, which adds a blue color to the water. By Jacob Surland, www.caughtinpixels.com.
This could look like ice, but it isn’t, it is a long exposure of water on a fairly windy day. It’s in a narrow bay, the waves don’t get big, but they had a little white foam on top. I took this photo using a tripod and because it was very windy, I dug the legs into the sand on the beach, to keep the camera wasn’t steady enough for a long exposure.

But how to get a long exposure of 20 seconds around sunset? I did three things:

  1. First of all I turned the ISO down to 100. If I had shot it at ISO 200, the exposure time would have been cut in half to 10 seconds, and at ISO 400 only 5 seconds. So to maximize the exposure time I set it to the lowest ISO I could, which was ISO 100.
  2. Then I also set the f-stop low (remember that low f-stops are high values) – I had it at f/16. Had I shot it at f/4, which is the highest f-stop the lens will go to, I would also have cut the shutter speed in half a few times. That’s why you call a lens that has a very high f-stop like f/2.8 or maybe even f/1.4 a fast lens, because it gives shorter shutter times.
  3. The last and equally important step was that I attached a Neutral Density Filter (ND filter) to the lens. A ND-filter is like a pair of sunglasses that blocks the light. ND-filters comes in different flavors that are more or less dark. In this case I attached a ND density filter that stopped down the light two full Exposure Value Steps. Or in plain english it doubled the shutter speed twice, which brought the shutter speed from 5 seconds to 20 seconds.

And that is how I made the water look this way. It came as surprise to myself, that it looked like ice, I had anticipated a smokey look on the water. But I guess it comes from the fact, that it is shot in the blue hour, which adds a blue color to the water.

About the processing

I shot this photo as an HDR, but in the end I only used a single shot, because it ended up being perfectly exposed. I tried putting it through Photomatix, but it didn’t anything of interest. So in the end I just straightened it up using a crop tool and I added at bit of post-crop vignetting in Lightroom.

So the photo is pretty much straight out of camera.

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