The Story
February, 2009. My new acquisition, the 10 stop filter from Hitech, had arrived a few days ago. I was looking to buy an extreme Neutral Density filter since the first time I had seen photos with long exposures during the day. Now that I already had the filter, I started searching for potential spots. They had to be near a water scape. After some search I decided to go to Cabo Raso, near Cascais, about 35 Km from Lisboa. This is a very common spot for long exposure shots near Lisboa.
In this day the sky was cloudy and that would add some extra interest to the scenery: moving clouds :) So I talked with my wife and she agreed to take a small trip there. I packed the usual gear plus the tripod and we headed to Cabo Raso. When we arrived, we parked the car near the lighthouse and my wife stayed inside reading while I went exploring.
First I went towards the rocky beach that's near the lighthouse. I tried some classical perspectives with the rocks in the sand in the foreground and the sea in the background. I had lots of problems with these shots: it was windy, the wide angle lens made me approach the sea and the spray kept the filter dirty all the time. The few shots I managed to take without spray were full of noise from the filter holder light (Later on I discovered a good technique to get around this issue: use part of a sock around the filter holder).
For some tips on how to proper use these kind of filters, please check the Rossio photo story.
Next stop: the lighthouse. This time, from an upper level, I had all the conditions to get away from the spray and try the filter. I took some photos with the lighthouse in the frame. From this same spot, I noticed some abandoned watches that were part of an old fortification that existed there. I took a couple pictures of these watches and get back to the car. The Sun had already set and it was too dark to continue. For the first experiment I was satisfied.
Equipment / Technical Info
Nikon D80
Sigma 10-20mm F4-5.6 EX DC
Hitech 85 ND 3.0 filter
Slik Pro 340DX tripod
100/1 second
F/9.0
13 mm
100
Original Photo
Post Processing
When I reviewed the few photos taken this day, I came to a conclusion: almost all of them were rubbish. They were too dirty and too dark. Even this one, if you look at it, it's badly exposed (note: if you take this kind of photos very near the sunset, it's hard to get the exposure right because the light is fading rapidly. You need to increase the exposure time quite a lot than the calculated one) and the colors are all wrong. This last problem was a non issue because the idea was to convert it to Black and White.
I imported the NEF into Lightroom and started by removing some dust spots (they were more visible because I used a very small aperture) and then adjusted the White Balance and the Blue Hue (I always try to get the colors right before converting to Black and White, who knows if the real colors surprise me). Then I added some Fill Light and increased the Blacks, added a Graduated Filter to darken the sky a bit just before I increase the Exposure. Then I started playing around with presets and ended up using the "Matt's Classic Split Tone" preset (you can find it here: http://www.lightroomkillertips.com/2007/monday-preset-my-favorite-split-tone/), followed by some high Vignetting increase and by another preset: "Civil War 2" preset by Vidular (you can find it here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/vidular/2456010834/). Finally, I adjusted the Vignetting to my like.
In CS4, I've converted to Black and White (Maximum White preset), increased the Contrast and applied the "Warm (26)" action (you can find this and other actions to simulate the effect of Gradient filters here: http://www.thelightsrightstudio.com). This gave me the full size (10Mp) final image.
I usually publish my photos with 1024px in the largest size and use a great Photoshop action by Manyk to do the re-size. You can find it here: http://manyk.deviantart.com/art/Web-Sharpening-with-Photoshop-29038461
Final Photo
Link to image
http://jpgmn.deviantart.com/art/The-Watch-114546227
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