Gordonmac Dot Com

Since getting my 10 stop B+W ND filter I have become somewhat obsessed with long exposure photography. A large majority of the photography taken with these filters seem to end up in black and white, and very often feature water in the frame – everyone (well, almost everyone) loves that wispy water effect using a slow shutter! I have found that colour works very well in long exposure too, and there is no better time to get amazing colour than at sunset!

The shot above was a 78 second exposure with aperture set at f/22 and ISO set to 100. I used cloudy white balance to stress the red colours in the sky. The base exposure without the 10 stop filter attached was 1/13 of a second (if you want to find out how I calculated the final exposure, have a look at my tutorial on long exposure photography).

The way the colour in the sky smears across the frame with the clouds in the direction the wind was slowly blowing is pretty impressive when you consider that this isn’t a hugely long exposure, and down on the ground the air was perfectly still! At first I thought there would probably be no benefit at all from using the filter and dropping the shutter speed – wrong!

As obsessed as I am with the 10 stop filter, I like to take a picture minus the filter, too…

There is no better shot here, they’re the same – both alright – but totally different!