Poor Light?
Despite a busy week in all areas of my live I did manage to get out on Thursday evening. I just walked down to my local lake, Derwent Water. I was hoping that there my be some sort of sunset with some colour to get some nice images. However I could see as I was heading off that this was unlikely as the sky was full of grey clouds. There was good definition in the sky though and I thought I would be able to get some good dramatic images. The is the theme of my most recent video.
I started off by heading to Friar’s Crag to capture the view down the lake. I started off with just a circular polariser on the lens giving a shiver speed of 1/13th of a second. I had set the camera to monochrome as I felt that this would give the best rendering of the image before me. I then used various ND filters to slowly make the exposure longer and longer. The longest with a 10 stop and a 3 stop was 8 minutes. Having got the images home and processed them I felt the one with a minutes exposure was the best, see below.
View from Friar’s Crag
This is a minute exposure to show that movement in the sky.
I then made my way to the centennial stones and went through the same process. On this occasion I felt that the best image was the one with the longest exposure, the eight minute exposure, see below.
The Centennial Stones
I am very pleased with this image and shows what can be done to work with the light that you have.
So what is the moral of this story.
As landscape photographers, we are all aware that we have to work with the light that is there. We cannot just move a light or add a light as someone in a studio could do. Given this we need to learn the many different techniques that are available to us. On this occasion there were two techniques that came to my rescue that combined give the images you see. The two are capturing the image in monochrome and the second is using a very long exposure.
The first one would have worked on its own as the image below shows. The second would not have worked as well on its own due to the lack of any could in the sky. In my opinion though using both together creates some nice images.
Centennial Stones
Here we have the same composition but this time at quicker shutter speed of 1/5th of a second.