Rodney Campbell's Blog

Two takes on one scene to show you just how much difference stoppin’ time can make.

These two frames were taken consecutively one morning – less than one minute apart. Which is basically the time it takes to get out the heavy ND filter and insert it into the frame and roughly calculate what I think the required exposure time will be.

The first is a traditional exposure of the composition using a circular polariser stacked with a three (3) stop graduated neutral density filter. Dropping the ISO to 50 and using a slightly stopped down aperture of f/11 lets me extend the exposure time out to 1 second. At this level the water isn’t frozen in motion but it isn’t totally blurred as it moves. So we are left with the stringy texture of the moving water in the frame. It’s a nice enough shot but I wanted more and I wanted a level of simplification and peace to the image.

Outta Time

NIKON D750 + 24.0-70.0 mm f/2.8 @ 38 mm, 1 sec at f/11, ISO 50

Note: These photographs (especially the wider shots) look much better when larger. To see larger versions in an inline overlay slideshow gallery viewer click any of the images.

Queue the Lee BigStopper – which is simply added to the stack of existing filters. This ten (10) stop ND does however reduce the incoming light down to 1/1000th of the normal light. This dramatically increases the required exposure time.

I didn’t have all day to wait so I bumped the ISO to 200 (three stops higher) and let it rip for 430 seconds (over 7 minutes). The end result – exactly the same framing and composition but the final images are drastically different.

Stoppin’ Time

NIKON D750 + 24.0-70.0 mm f/2.8 @ 38 mm, 430 sec at f/11, ISO 200

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