Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park Long Exposure Part Deux
2012.06.16
Day Sixty. Being so impressed with the results of my last tromp through Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park with a tripod and some ND filters, I decided to go back, this time after buying one from B+W. It has a full 10 stops of light reduction. Combining that withe ISO 50, I was easily able to do 30 second exposures in the woods. Problems quickly arose when I realized that 30 seconds at ISO 50 turned out to not be long enough to fully expose the images. So, I started upping the ISO. At the time, it seemed like a good idea. The images were properly exposing, what could possibly be wrong with that? High ISO noise is the answer to that question. In post, I was able to bump up the exposure on the dark images without introducing noise, but the noise reduction on the higher ISO images left them grainy. And, worse, if there was any part of the image that was in direct sunlight, it'd be over exposed if the rest of image was properly exposed. What I'm learning is that a lot more information is hiding in the darker parts of the image, but if a part is washed out, it's lost forever. Exposure issued aside, the filter also introduced significant colour shifts to lighter portions of the images. The previously borrowed ND introduced a uniform colour shift, which was easily correctable in post, but since this filter only shifted parts, I had a much harder time correcting for it, as is evident by the magenta tones present throughout. I'm not really sure if there's anything I can do about it. I guess it might look nice if you enjoy the "rose coloured glasses" look, but I'd much rather it not be there. After doing some reading, it looks like this is a problem with the B+W filter. Unfortunately, I don't think I'll be able to return it (thanks to my habit of destroying packaging while trying to open it) ... I just hope I haven't ruined too many pictures by only finding this out now (and by "now", I mean mid July when I finally got around to reviewing this set) given that I have a lot of sets where I used the filter waiting to get reviewed ... *sigh* ... after getting out of the woods, I went over to the falls and attempted to recreate some of the awesome shots I got last time. This time, it was much earlier in the day sunlight wise (despite being later time wise ... thank you winter vs summer) so I ended up over exposing every single image. I ended up keeping the best of them (despite them being slightly over exposed) if for no other reason than this set would have been really small if I hadn't ...
