Light #6 - Too much light.

[RichardTaylor]

Light 6.

Too much light.

Some times you can have too much light to record the immage the way you want to in the available light. The solution may be to use the lowest possible ISO or if that is not low enough to use a neutral density (ND) filter to reduce the light the camera sees or in the case of at least one point and shoot camera switch on the inbuilt neutral density filter.

Some examples where you may want to use a ND filter. :

(1) Here a wide aperture was needed to isolate the subjects. Full sunlight on a bright sunny day. Here F2 was the desired aperture. If the maximum shutter speed of the camera used was lower than than the 1/6400 used here then a stop ND filter would have been needed the value depending on the camera's maximum shutter speed.



Camera Canon EOS 40D
Exposure 1/6400 sec
Aperture f/2.0
Focal Length 135 mm
ISO Speed 100
Exposure Bias -1 EV
Flash Off, Did not fire

(2)Again in bright sunshine at minimum ISO. An even lower shutter speed (at this aperture) would have been nice. Without a ND filter 1/160 was the slowest shutter speed I could shoot at for this panning shot.



Camera Canon EOS 40D
Exposure 0.006 sec (1/160)
Aperture f/14.0
Focal Length 170 mm
ISO Speed 100
Exposure Bias -2/3 EV

(3) In shade. From experience an exposure of around 1 second was needed to give a "nice" and not over the top blur to the falls. The inbuilt 3 stop ND filter on this P&S camera was turned on to give me the desired exposure.



Camera Canon PowerShot G11
Exposure 0.8
Aperture f/8.0 (minimum aperture)
Focal Length 8.1 mm
ISO Speed 200

Having a ND filter gives you a lot more options when choosing exposure settings..

More to come

-----------------

Other parts of this series

#1 Introduction
Light #1 - Introduction.

#2 How much? Enough #1.
Light #2 - How much? Enough #1.

#3 Indoors #1
Light #3 - Indoors (1)

#4 Low light outdoors #1
Light #4 - Low light outdoors #1

#5 High contrast.
Light #5 - High contrast

#7 Light direction.
Lifgt #7 - Directiuon

#8 Weather
Light #8 - Weather

#9 Time of day.
Light #9 - What time of day to shoot?

Larger versions of the pics are on my Flickr stream
Thanks for looking, and feel free to ask questions or comment.

Richard

[Doug Sundseth]

For landscapes, I'm usually shooting so wide that my DoF becomes a non-issue compositionally. Because of that, I normally carry a single 6-stop ND. If I need less light-reduction, I use aperture.

If I were shooting for shallow DoF, I might need more options.

[RichardTaylor]

Thanks Doug.

[ccting]

Will "too much light" cause overshoot that lead to visible halos that bring down the quality of images significantly? I have seen a picture posted by KenRockWell captured by T3i revealing obvious visible halos that is really ugly..while shooting the roof with sun together..

[RichardTaylor]

Can you post a link to the photograph?

It may be flare, which can be a real problem.

[ccting]

I wish to but i lost the link. And, i am still finding the link. If I am not mistaken, the photo is taken by Kenrockwell while comparing T3i with D5100.

[Cloe]

Thanks for this info! I'll keep ND filters in mind later on this summer where it really starts getting bright around where I live.

[RichardTaylor]

Glad to help out.

[macroMe]

With the image of the panned racing car was there a reason you did not close the aperture any further than F14?
Thanks.
Oh and btw - interesting set of articles

[RichardTaylor]

Thanks.
In hindsight I probably could have gone down to F22 without any real problems..