What’s Your Preference?

kim-i · #1 (**permalink**) 11-28-2011, 06:40 AM

So, the other day I went out after becoming inspired by an article in digital slr photography magazine on "moody seascapes" I had for a while.
The weather was really blah with overcast skies and greyness as far as you could see with the rain starting and stoping like a city busy full of people.
I wanted simple and clean composition possible as I wanted to convert my shot into black and white afterwards.

Let's go through the stages that I went through to produce the final shot:

Composition - I had an idea for the location that would give me the best chance of getting the shot I had been visualising, so when I arrived it was just a case of taking a look around, picking a spot and lining everything up. I went through a few test shots before deciding on my final composition. Because I was going to be using my "big stopper" I would have to lock in the composition before I started to take any real shots because the filter is so dark you can't actually see through it.

Big Stopper - I knew that I wanted to really smooth the surface of the water out for this shot and seeing as this was the late afternoon and was still daylight, I used my 10-stop B-W ND filter. This filter let me take around 60 second exposures in broad daylight, so was perfect for this situation. ND filters try to be as colour-neutral as possible but with such a high amount of light being cut out from the ND1000 filter it's inevitable that there will be a slight shift. I actually like the reddish tint that the B-W produces.

Big Stopper + 0.9 Grad Filter - Here is a shot i got after the 0.9 grad filter was applied on top of my big stopper. As you can see a big change in the light with the foreground becoming brighter and vibrant. The shot pops out more and its not dull as the one we took just with the big stopper. This was the shot I wanted to to work with and convert into the b&w.