Tired of lighthouse photos yet? Not me!
When I started thinking about photographing the Maine coast, naturally the first thing I thought of was lighthouses. In anticipation of a day just like today, I purchased a variable neutral density filter. Today was my first chance to really try it out. It seems to work best on cloudy days and with long-ish lenses. It makes a mess on my wide-angle 10-24 lens except at the most gentle settings, darkening the corners dramatically. Works pretty well on the longer end of the 16-80 but works really well on the 55-200. I got a little buffeting from the gusty winds but a 3.5 second exposure like this one worked pretty well. I processed it using the Classic Chrome profile in Lightroom instead of my usual Velvia-based preset. I think it shows the raw power of the wind and surf.
We were very glad to have been on the water yesterday and on land today! Gusty winds and rough seas would have made for an unpleasant journey today!
No, I’m not tired of lighthouses. Wonder if the messiness is the quality of the filter or you’ve got a bad one. I’ve always wanted one myself.
It’s a characteristic of the filter, actually. If you overdo the effect it ends up darkening the corners – an over-exaggeration of the effect you get with a polarizer on a wide lens. Its hard to see in the viewfinder so you don’t always realize you’ve done it until you see it on screen. I should be able to correct some of it in post processing but it’s not as easy to do on my laptop.
I’ll send you an example and may do a follow up post about it.
3.5 seconds! Hand-held I’m guessing, wow! Did you levitate to avoid the ship’s motion?
There’s a very nice pastel-ish feel to this that I like.
No way I’m that good! 🙂 This was at a roadside pulloff, standing next to the car, on the tripod, 2 second delay, etc!