| Subcribe via RSS

Advice from the lovely Huwge

November 13th, 2006 Posted in Mundane musings

I’m reposting Huwge’s comment on my “Experimenting” post (below) with my replies.

Em - I’m assuming you shot this in manual mode, …

I did

… so you should have been able to stop down and adjust time - …

Yes, I did

did you also set ISO to the lowest value.

Yes, ISO 50

Also, which ND filter do you have?

It’s a x2 filter

Are you using a circular polariser?

Yep

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.

I think that’s where I went wrong (apart from the location) - it wasn’t the tail of the day. Also, I don’t have a proper DSLR. :-(

Also, can you bracket exposures?

Yes, I can but didn’t,

Finally, do you use the histogram or the camera’s auto function to determine / understand exposure?

I used the exposure meter rather than the histogram, adjusting the shutter speed until it told me the shot wouldn’t be overexposed.

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.

I was actually looking for a similar effect, but having the leaves blowing in the wind blurred instead of water. That’s wise advice there and I hope it’s as helpful to others too. Thanks again, Huwge.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 13th, 2006 at 11:55 pm and is filed under Mundane musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Advice from the lovely Huwge”

  1. Huwge Says:

    November 14th, 2006 at 6:09 am

    :-)
    I forgot to add that whilst over-exposure is difficult to repair, if you use a tripod and different exposure settings then you can fake results by using the sky from one where foreground is in the shadows and the foreground where the sky is overblown.

    I don’t know the camera you use, but it may also be possible to change the metering mode. Again, experimentation is the only way to learn / understand what works best for a situation and perhaps more importantly, your camera.

    Huw


Leave a Reply