Author Topic: What to do when the weather sucks (Read 430 times)

peterb666 · « **on:** October 08, 2011, 01:06:07 AM »

I have always liked the old glass-plate photos from the late 1800s and early 1900s. I have tried to create that look here. The weather has been less than ideal for photography and the lighting as flat as a pancake so I had to try something different.

This scene is of Mimosa Rocks in southern New South Wales (Australia). Taken with an Olympus E-P3 and 12mm f/2 lens, I have used a HiTech 10-stopper to extend the exposure to 6 seconds and of course given it a black and white treatment. I think I have captured the feel of the old photos.

Mimosa Rocks bw o12 by peterb666, on Flickr

vdub_er · « **Reply #1 on:** October 08, 2011, 01:34:33 AM »

Time well spent. Great how you have been able to capture the texture in the clouds

cosinaphile · « **Reply #2 on:** October 08, 2011, 07:51:01 AM »

you did achieve that feeling , i love it

that an nd filter?

peterb666 · « **Reply #3 on:** October 10, 2011, 09:06:46 PM »

Quote from: cosinaphile on October 08, 2011, 07:51:01 AM

you did achieve that feeling , i love it

that an nd filter?

Yep, the 10-stop ND filter allowed be to have a 6-second exposure and that flattened out the sea. The normal exposure in that light would have been around 1/160s. Athough there was a reasonable swell of around 1.4m on the day, this spot is very sheltered and there was little wave action and it probably wasn't necessary to take such a long exposure - maybe 2 seconds would have been plenty.

The shot is a panorama made from 4 portrait images. A minor bit of tweaking in Adobe Camera RAW (e.g. ehanced the clarity and underexposed the sky by around 1-stop) to get the sky looking reasonable. I then exported the images from RAW to uncompressed TIFFs. That is my standard workflow. I then joined the 4 frames in Adobe Photoshop CS5 and saved the output as an uncompressed stiff with all layers removed so I could re-load in Adobe Camera RAW for some final tweaking and then the conversion to black and white. I prefer to do this sort of work in Camera RAW as it results in very little degration of the file as all the changes are applied in one hit when you export the image.

What to do when the weather sucks