a couple of minutes...

We often think photography is a case of; see something nice and line up the camera followed by a press of a button, a whirr of a shutter and a blink of light onto the camera’s sensor (or film, depending on your preference).

And it can often be just that - but it can also be so much more. Take this drab and dingy January day as a prime example…

Whilst this day was drab and dingy, it was also my birthday, so what better excuse to head out with the camera and take in a view or two (and the obligatory birthday Full English). We headed to a favourite coastal town, quaffed a breakfast and then walked to a headland I knew had some very interesting rock formations.

Naturally, I was hoping the weather was going to be my best birthday present and the low winter sun was going to come out of hiding and provide some fantastic raking light from right to left and give beautiful shape and form to the rocks and clouds.

Sadly, this is the UK, in January; drab and dingy it is then!

My original plan had been to climb down to sea level and use a wide angle to show the rocks in all their finest solitude, with acres of sea and sky surrounding them. That quickly changed due to the weather and I opted for the cliff-top looking down view that you see here.

Going back to the opening paragraph, here’s the press/whirr/blink version, or an exposure of 1/50th sec @ f/11 to be more precise. This initial image perfectly matched the weather - very drab and dingy! Time to play with exposures…

Even though there wasn’t much light, there were quite a few reflections bouncing off the rocks, so a circular polariser filter was added to help control the wayward light. It still amazes me the difference such a simple tweak can make - now I could see the shape and form of the rocks clearly, and any reflections off the water had gone. The polariser also slows the shutter slightly, but not enough to add any drama, so it’s still not an exciting image… yet…

Slowing the shutter speed further could add some energy to the water, and move it on from an uninteresting very static image and make it more appealing. As it was late morning, the light levels were relatively high, so a solid Neutral Density filter was the way to go; out came the 6-stop ND. If you’ve not seen one of these filters, they’re designed to reduce the amount of light that passes through, so the less light hitting the sensor, the slower the shutter speed needs to be to give a correct exposure - think of a square of high-quality welding glass!

By 6-stop, we’re talking of halving the amount of light passing through the filter 6 times, which has a significant impact on the shutter speed. The polariser takes another stop of light in these conditions, so the original 1/50th of a second quickly stretches.

These two filters gave me a shutter speed of 5-seconds - which added a different dimension or ”problem”…

Watching the incoming waves, they were rolling over the rocks from top right to bottom left at an angle of about 45-degrees. Counting in my head, it was taking 8 or 9-seconds for each wave to roll over the rocks. So quite when should I trip the shutter? Time to experiment! Some results were more appealing than others, and I really liked a couple of the captures, including the one below, but I still wanted to explore further with even longer shutter speeds.

Time for the 10-stop Neutral Density filter to come out!

By using this filter, and changing the aperture to f/16 from f/11 (which adds another stop of lost light into the equation), I’m now looking at an exposure time of 120-seconds!

The “problem” with this filter is you can’t see through it when it’s attached, so you really need to have your composition nailed and focus point sorted before adding the filter. The plus side of this though is it really makes you look at your composition, which made me realise the rocks weren’t quite “right” so a tweak of angles was needed.

I have to say I’m really pleased with this final 2-minute exposure and am already thinking of other compositions with long exposures I could make at this venue when the weather is more colour photography-friendly. I can’t wait!

 

Exposure information:
120 sec at f/16, ISO100

Filters used:
3.0 Neutral Density plus Circular Polariser.

Post processing:
RAW file processed in Adobe Lightroom including the B&W conversion.