Things To Do While Waiting For The Light
Sometimes you may find yourself in a beautiful place waiting a while for that golden light before the sun sets. I used one of those times to try out a my new Singh-Ray Vari-ND Variable Neutral Density Filter. With this filter one can vary that amount of light hitting the sensor from two to eight stops, providing a lot of creative control of exposure. This is important because the sensors in digital cameras are generally more sensitive to light than film, and therefore it can be difficult to get the long exposure times needed to give water falls that feeling of motion.
I set up my tripod and camera to photograph the same water fall over a wide range of exposure times to see the difference. Here is my series of fourteen photographs using ISO 200. Which one do you like the best?
f3.5 1/320 sec No Filter
f4.5 1/200sec No Filter
f6.3 1/100sec No Filter
f/9 1/50sec No Filter
f/13 1/25sec No Filter
f/18 1/13sec No filter
f/11 1/8sec Vari ND
f/16 1/4sec Vari ND
f/16 1/2sec Vari ND
f16 1.0sec Vari ND
f16 1.3secs Vari ND
f16 2.0secs Vari ND
f16 3.0secs Vari ND
f16 4.0secs Vari ND
Using the Vari ND filter allows for much longer exposures and a lot of creative choices that are important for photographing flowing water. One issue I had was the undesirable vignetting(the dark areas in the corners of the photos caused by using too wide an angle of view and the filter edges become visible in the frame) when I added the Vari ND filter. But for the purposes of my test I chose not to zoom in to avoid it because I wanted to keep the exact same field of view for all the photos.
For this test I liked the one that was at 1/4 of a second.
