I don’t make long exposure photos in the daylight often. The reason is, that I don’t feel like hauling filters around. I made a filter holder a while ago, which holds a welding glass, but I have since found out that it has a few quirks. The glass unfortunately has a few imperfections, which do show in most circumstances. The last time I used it was for Heavy on the Mind and Soul project and while it did work.
Then the other month, as I was doing some research for something completely different, I stumbled upon couple of ways of doing long exposures in the day time without the need for an ND filter (Neutral Density filter is a filter which effectively dims down or blocks certain amount of light coming into the camera). So the way it’s done, is that you digitally merge or average the photos of shorter exposures, thus effectively creating a long exposure photo. The cool thing about such process is, that you can have more play room in the digital dark-room as you would with “the ND process”. Especially if you don’t do your math correctly and make too many photos, you could just as well decide to use less for a different effect.
Let me show you what I mean. Bellow you can two photos. Don’t mind that one is out of focus. What you can notice is that the one with silkier water isn’t silky enough, but is already blowing out the highlights. I could stop it down more by making the aperture smaller, say F16, but I didn’t want that. I wanted the trees in the back blurry. The only way of doing that is by having an aperture almost wide open, which in this case was 3,5. While there was still some clipping in the highlights at F3,5 @ 1/60s with ISO 100, it wasn’t nearly as bad as when it was taken at 1s.
So. How do we make a longer exposure, to at least mimic or do better than the one at 1s without clipping and without an ND filter? [Read more…]