Alex Wise Photography

Non exis­tent sun­set at Howrah Beach. Cap­tured with usual shi­daz­zle of a Canon 5D Mark II, Canon 17–40, Cokin Z-Pro .6 and .9 grad­u­ated neu­tral den­sity fil­ters under expos­ing the sky to give it more oomph. It occurred to me while writ­ing what equip­ment I use that it sounds ter­ri­bly wanky. I try to post my equip­ment and retain the exif data on my images in case any­one is curious.

f.16 at 1.60 sec­onds with a Canon 5D Mark II, Canon 17–40, Cokin Z-Pro neu­tral den­sity filters.

Another shot from Kingston Beach, Tas­ma­nia on sun­set. This time cap­tured in por­trait. I find myself shoot­ing in land­scape ori­en­ta­tion more and more now, but love going back to por­trait com­pos­ing with a pow­er­ful fore­ground that leads into the background.

Just in case any­one is inter­ested, a before and after show­ing the straight out of cam­era a lit­tle under exposed which was adjusted in Lightroom.

Water rush­ing over rocks at Kingston Beach, Tas­ma­nia cap­tured with a 1/3 sec expo­sure at f/14.

Set timer, mad dash over wet rocks into frame, fin­gers crossed that I don’t jig­gle around, check lcd.

30 sec­ond expo­sure at f/11.

As the cloud slowly rolled in through­out the after­noon, I made plans to take a drive and get some pho­tos some­where. As I arrived at Clifton I realised I had brought my bro­ken tri­pod, fan­tas­tic! I wanted to cap­ture at least one photo of the beau­ti­ful clouds so I laid over the rocks, posi­tion­ing the cam­era on a rock and snapped away.

This is a 1.3″ sec­ond expo­sure at F.13 with the Canon 5D Mark II, Canon 17–40 and Cokin Z-Pro grad­u­ated neu­tral den­sity fil­ters to con­trol the expo­sure of the sky.

Recently I wrote a small buy­ing guide for neu­tral den­sity fil­ters that you may want to look at (click).

A small buy­ing guide to assist you in mak­ing the right pur­chases to pho­to­graph day­time long expo­sures. Using strong neu­tral den­sity fil­ters will allow you to shoot 1–5 minute expo­sures dur­ing the day depend­ing on the con­di­tions. If you’re bored with pho­tog­ra­phy, neu­tral den­sity fil­ters are a great way to reju­ve­nate your hobby and get pas­sion­ate again. It can be reward­ing but also some­times chal­leng­ing as you’re forced to look at a scene from the per­spec­tive of how a long expo­sure will trans­form it.

Read more…

A culled image that I’ve come back to a few times. I’ve always looked at the photo and wished the cloud was in the mid­dle of the frame, not dis­ap­pear­ing out of it. What can you do?

A photo from way back cap­tur­ing the sun­set reflec­tions at Hope Beach, Tasmania

http://​www​.vimeo​.com/​3​7​8​6​547

It’s fair to say 2009 was the year of the long expo­sures for me. I’ve had a lot of fun with the Canon 5D Mark II and B+W 110 fil­ter over the year and look­ing back am sur­prised how many pho­tographs I actu­ally took.

I hope 2009 was a good year for your photography!

1/2 sec­ond expo­sure at f/18 cap­tured with Cokin neu­tral den­sity fil­ters at South Arm, Tas­ma­nia.  One down­side to shoot­ing with grad­u­ated neu­tral den­sity fil­ters is the uneven expo­sure they can leave on cliffs.