Experimenting
I’ve been out and about this morning, to Weeting Castle via the amusingly named Two Mile Bottom in fact.
The first photo, though, comes from one lunchtime last week and is of the rear of St George church, Colegate near the orifice. I’d been reading (in Outdoor Photography) techniques for getting interesting photos in low light conditions so I picked up the P850, and ND and polarising filter and my trusty tripod. The technique I was going for involves opening up the lens as far as it’ll go (although that’s just to f8 on the P850) and using a long shutter speed (hence the ND filter) combined with a polarising filter to bring out the colours. I’m not sure it worked too well but then it was a little too bright today to really test things - even with those filters, I coiuld only slow down the shutter to 1/15s for the first shot rather than the 5 or 10 seconds I was hoping for.
The colours are, of course, down to post-shot manipulation in Picasa rather than my having happened across a bizarrely saturated part of Thetford Forest. It was rather blustery at Weeting, which is a shame because the yew berries were being nicely photogenic. At 1/4s they just wouldn’t stay still long enough to avoid being blurred.
I’m quite pleased with the photo of Weeting church from the castle, though, even if some fat bloke did spoil one shot.
November 13th, 2006 at 8:22 pm
Em - I’m assuming you shot this in manual mode, so you should have been able to stop down and adjust time - did you also set ISO to the lowest value. Also, which ND filter do you have? Are you using a circular polariser? At the tail end of the day, at this time of year I would have expected you to get away with a 1 sec. exposure without it being overblown. f8 isn’t a great deal when you consider what a D-SLR offers. Also, can you bracket exposures? Finally, do you use the histogram or the camera’s auto function to determine / understand exposure.
The key thing is to take as many shots with as many combinations as possible and then make a note of the settings captured in the file info - should record ISO, aperture and shutter speed as well as any exposure compensation. Still not sure the effect you were trying to achieve, ND and slow speeds are usually used for moody shots that blur / freeze running water in the image. If colour saturation is your goal, a low ISO and polariser should deliver good results.