using photographic filters can enhance your photography tremendously, but you've got to use them
appropriately.
This one here is a neutral density grab.
so you could put this darker area over the sky to make the sky darker
i use filters occasionally in my work
but i'm not an expert with it, so i thought for the purposes of this
exercise it would be worth speaking to somebody who is.
This is Tom Mackey.
he has one of the few photographers who actually does
live the dream and travel all over this amazing world and take beautiful photographs.
He also keeps cheese in his camera
bag, he can't help it can he.
He gave me some earlier it was good.
So Tom we've already talked about
this pier and the structure and the
composition we can get
with these piles in here. But we're going to do
something with a neutral density filter which cuts
the light out, why would someone want to do such a stupid thing as to remove the light?
up it does seem
very strange that you'd want to do that, but
you can create some very very interesting effects.
by uh... using long exposures such as two or three minutes,
but you've got something like this, you've got the water going in and out, you can get some really nice
effects. Excellent that sounds like fun, let's go and give it a go.
Let's try it. I'll grab your bag.
thank you and i might eat your cheese. No.
to demonstrate this neutral density effect we're going to use a really really
powerful neutral density filter, we're going to go to the extreme and
and not just do it a little bit, so you really get what we're on about.
Tom has got here what lee call their big stopper, this stops ten stops
of light, this means it's twenty times darker than it actually is here
Can i borrow that, yeah.
take a look at this if i just,
bring this over
and put it in front of the lens
it's gone dark.
there is like getting in through there, but very very little light
so therefore, you've got to use a very very slow exposure.
Tom talk us through how you calculate the exposure. Okay, now the first thing you
need to do is determine your normal exposure
so we'll go ahead and do that.
okay
now that's roughly about eight of a second, so the other thing we need to do
is shut the auto focus off
because with this in place
the cameras going to try and focus but it's not going to be able to see anything
so it's going to go out of focus if you don't turn it off.
So let's switch to manual focus, okay. Now we'll put this into place
with the foam edge towards the lens
so that seals the light so there's no light getting in around here, okay.
Now we're going to set it to bold.
bold means that the shutter speed stays open until you tell it to close.
Okay now,
to generally get the correct exposure for this
they give you this nice little guide,
so we look on here
and we see an eighth
so we need to do two minute with the big stopper
So that means your exposure has gone from an eighth of a second which is really quick to
like
click like that and it's an eighth of a second
to two clicks the first when the shutter opens
to the second click when it closes is a two minute gap, so you need something to do
in between times. Yeah.
Okay, so we're all set up
you've got your filter in place you've got your position set on a tripod.
you can never do this without a tripod, never even consider it
use a nice sturdy one.
We're going to use the cable release
so we're not even touching the camera. Alright
so let's go ahead put that in and lock it in,
and now we just
literally
just look at the watch and count two minutes.
no all we've got to do is kill time. what shall we do? go for a walk, have some cheese?
right that should be about cooked
let's have a look, let's get this right,
okay, and two minutes.
let's have a look and see what we've got.
Lovely, that is great
Now what's going on here,
is these pillars these uprights they're all standing completely still.
and so it makes no difference that the shutter's open for two minutes because
they're not going anywhere.
the walter is rippling around and sort of bubbling about and that is blurring,
for two minutes that waters been doing its thing
and the long slow shutter speed has let that blur onto the sensor
so you get this lovely really kind of
i don't know almost ghostly-ness about the water.
and that's what i mean about appropriate use of filters can really give your
photography the edge.