At the weekend I though I'd try my hand a some milky-water shots (which seem all the rage ;-), but I'm less than enamoured with my results despite getting thoroughly soaked and the tripod submerged by the incoming tide.
The photos were taken on a very blustery Sunday afternoon at Whitstable, the conditions were very changeable (as can be seen from the different cloud-cover between these two images taken half an hour apart). I was using a 10-Stop ND along with a Polariser to both accentuate the sky and to provide a further couple of stops of exposure.
I used a towel (which I'd been using to keep everything dry) to artificially create a soft-grad so that the sky didn't blow-out (I'm quite pleased with the effect of rocking the towel across the upper half of the frame) but overall I'm not that pleased with them! They're very soft, were severely lacking in contrast, and there are artefacts along the sea/sky boundary even on the RAW images (possibly a result of splashes on the filter and exaggerated by increasing the contrast). The B&W conversions are significantly worse with exaggerated artefacts and a lot of noise in the clouds.
I've tried processing the images in both DPP and ALR, but the results either way are poor.
Any advise or comments would be most welcome! These type of shots are difficult to learn as exposures are lengthy and conditions changeable, so trial and error techniques could take quite some time.
Thanks, Steve
A.jpg
21 seconds; f/22; ISO100; 15mm
B.jpg
90 Seconds; f/22; ISO100; 10mm
The photos were taken on a very blustery Sunday afternoon at Whitstable, the conditions were very changeable (as can be seen from the different cloud-cover between these two images taken half an hour apart). I was using a 10-Stop ND along with a Polariser to both accentuate the sky and to provide a further couple of stops of exposure.
I used a towel (which I'd been using to keep everything dry) to artificially create a soft-grad so that the sky didn't blow-out (I'm quite pleased with the effect of rocking the towel across the upper half of the frame) but overall I'm not that pleased with them! They're very soft, were severely lacking in contrast, and there are artefacts along the sea/sky boundary even on the RAW images (possibly a result of splashes on the filter and exaggerated by increasing the contrast). The B&W conversions are significantly worse with exaggerated artefacts and a lot of noise in the clouds.
I've tried processing the images in both DPP and ALR, but the results either way are poor.
Any advise or comments would be most welcome! These type of shots are difficult to learn as exposures are lengthy and conditions changeable, so trial and error techniques could take quite some time.
Thanks, Steve
A.jpg
21 seconds; f/22; ISO100; 15mm
B.jpg
90 Seconds; f/22; ISO100; 10mm
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