60 Seconds

The Story
January 2011. After a lousy 2010 in what photo trips concerned, I decided that 2011 would be a return to normality. Nothing better than an one week holiday to get the year started. I had discovered a promising spot in the Seixal Bay, called Ponta dos Corvos. This spot had an abandoned factory and an abandoned shipyard that I decided to explore that day. I packed the gear and, after a quick lunch, I went there. It was an overcast day and when I approached Ponta dos Corvos I soon discovered that the road there was a perfect adventure: more holes than road and all of them filled with water. If I only had an 4x4 :) That, the almost raining weather and the insecurity of the spot cut my trip short.
Still it was very early in the afternoon and I couldn't throw that sky away that easily. After a short thinking, I decided to head to Cacilhas and try some long exposures in broad daylight.
I parked in the Cais do Ginjal and started to re-explore the place. After some photos, I decided to try this one. I mounted the tripod and the ND filter and gave it a try. I took half a dozen shots and the afternoon was already over - that's something typical when I do long exposures.

Equipment / Technical Info
Nikon D80
Sigma 10-20mm F4-5.6 EX DC
Hitech 85 ND 3.0 filter

Shutter Speed:60/1 second
Aperture:F/9.0
Focal Length:13 mm
ISO Speed:100

Original Photo


Post Processing
This photo was my first choice from that day. I imported it into Lightroom, removed some dust spots and then applied the automatic Lens Correction for the Sigma 10-20 lens. Then I slightly increased the Exposure, the Black Clipping and duplicated the Contrast. As the river was too dark, I applied an inverted Graduated Filter to the bottom and the reduced the Exposure again. Pushed the Contrast even upper, increased the Clarity to 60 and Converted to Black And White. There I increased the Blue Gray Level - at the moment, my idea was to apply a similar treatment to the one used in 233 seconds. But then I decided to try to decrease the Exposure a lot to have the opposite effect - a very dark look, instead of the brighter one in the other photo - I preferred the way the photo looked that way . I increased the Sharpening and the Black Clipping and then re-adjusted the Brightness - it was too dark. As the vignetting created by the filter holder started to show in the upper left corner, I Cropped it out. The I added another Graduated Filter, this time to darken the sky a little, made small adjustments to the Exposure and Brightness and applied my custom Split Tone preset.
It was ready. I published the photo to the usual sites and after some critiques that mentioned lack of contrast and that the photo was too dark, I decided to fix that issues. I changed the Point Curve to Strong Contrast and increased the Exposure a little.

Final Photo


Link to image
http://jpgmn.deviantart.com/art/60-Seconds-192438666

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233 seconds

The Story
December, 2009. The year was coming to an end and our life was about to get a U-turn very soon with the birth of our daughter. The photo trips were very few in that time and this one was to be the last one, for some time. I've already had been to Cais do Ginjal in Cacilhas and had taken some good photos there (like: The Pier and Cais do Ginjal II). This time I was about to try to capture a long exposure of the Tagus River during day time.
I picked the gear plus the tripod and we headed to Cacilhas. I miscalculated the hour and the remaining daylight available. This kind of photos take some time to capture: with preparing time and Long Exposure NR after, a 4 minutes exposure (like this one) takes about 10 minutes.
My wife stayed in the car while I went to the piers to get a good perspective. I knew that the Sun was setting too fast and I would only have a couple tries, at most. This photo was my first one. I picked a pier that would give me a good view over Lisboa, prepared the tripod and took a test run shot. This test run shot is useful to check the perspective and the exposure variables, and to later on compare with the long exposure shot. A couple test shots later I got a good perspective and calculated the exposure time, considering the 10 stops (as I mentioned previously in Rossio photo story, I multiply the exposure time by 1000 and round it upper).
With almost everything in place, I placed carefully the filter holder with the ND filter on it. Now it was time to a very important step: cover the filter holder so no light would come into the lens from anywhere else than the filter itself. For this I used the upper side of a black sock. I cut the elastic area of it, what gave me a dark tissue ring that fits perfectly in the filter holder.
With all set, I used the IR remote to start the exposure in bulb mode and counted 3 minutes. As the night was coming fast and my last tries at this hour of the day went not that good, I decided to increase one more minute to the calculated time. So, almost 4 minutes exposure would be enough, but I would have to wait another 4 to check the result (tip: in long exposure shots, almost every camera have a setting turned on by default - and should remain that way 99% of the times - to reduce the noise produced by the overheating of some pixels in the camera sensor. What the camera does is, after taking the photo, it closes the shutter and takes another shot with the same duration. The point is that the pixels that overheated the first time, will overheat in this second time. Then, the camera processor can compare both shots and remove this "hot" pixels.).
After this shot, I tried another one, 10 minutes long, that didn't came out very good because it was already dark. So, it was a small photo trip that took about 45 minutes and only gave me time to take two photos :)

Equipment / Technical Info
Nikon D80
Sigma 10-20mm F4-5.6 EX DC
Hitech 85 ND 3.0 filter
Slik Pro 340DX tripod

Shutter Speed: 233/1 second
Aperture: F/9.0
Focal Length: 13 mm
ISO Speed: 100

Original Photo


Post Processing
Back home, I went to inspect the two photos taken that late afternoon. The second one was too dark and I tried to get some of it in post processing because it was my favorite in terms of perspective. I failed to "fix" it so I would had to return there another day.
In this one, I first tried to fix the colors to see if it would surprise me but ended up with the black and white. What I've done was the following.
I imported the NEF into Lightroom and started by aligning the horizon and cropping it to my like. Then applied some Highlight Recovery and added a Graduated Filter to darken the sky. Increased the Exposure by one stop, reduced the Vignetting that resulted from the filter holder and converted to Grayscale. Then I adjusted the Gray levels on the Blues (up), Purples (down), Aquas (up) and Yellows (down); boosted the Clarity to 100%, re-increased the Exposure by half a stop and increased the Blacks to 35%. Finally, I updated the Graduated Filter exposure to darken the sky even more and increased the Fill Light.
In CS4, I've simply reduced the noise and applied an Auto Levels.
I kinda liked the result but knew that there were a long road ahead in this kind of photography.

Final Photo


Link to image
http://jpgmn.deviantart.com/art/233-seconds-148090938

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The Watch

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

Shutter Speed: 100/1 second
Aperture: F/9.0
Focal Length: 13 mm
ISO Speed: 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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Rossio

The Story
April, 2009. My wife's parents came to visit us and we had lunch at our place. After lunch my wife thought of taking them for a walk in downtown Lisboa.
A few weeks before, I've bought a new filter and I was eager to try it in a urban scenario. This filter was a 10 stop ND (neutral density) filter. With it I could do some long exposures in broad daylight. This kind of exposures would allow me to, for example, capture the clouds movement.
So I packed the material (camera, lenses, filters, filter holder, tripod) and we headed to Lisboa. When we got there, I left them doing some sightseeing and got right to business. I mounted the camera on the tripod and started exploring potential angles. I started with the Restauradores square but the angles weren't quite as I wanted. Then I moved to Rossio square and hanged there for a while. My objective was to capture the cloud movement and "erase" the people from the street.
The 10 stop filter is a bit tricky to use and I can't really say that I've already managed to use it properly. I will share with you some guidelines on how to use this filter:
- You need a tripod. This filter will cut 10 stops of light and what this means is that, if in a regular photo you will shoot at 1/100 seconds shutter speed, with this filter the same shot (without changing any other setting) will require a 10 seconds exposure (give or take).
- You must mount the camera on the tripod without the filter on and first choose the angle. After you choose the angle you must memorize the settings (Aperture, Shutter Speed) and move the camera into Manual mode (I usually shoot in Aperture mode). After the angle is chosen, you also need to change the focus to Manual.
- So, you got the camera on the tripod, without the filter, in Manual Focus mode. Now you must do some math :) I've simplified it: I simply multiply the Shutter Speed that the camera calculated in Aperture Mode for 1000. In doubt, I will chose the higher speed interval (the math may not give you an available speed interval).
- After the settings in Manual mode are set, I gently put the filter on the camera, taking extra care to not touch the zoom ring, nor the focus ring.
- Now all is set. I use the remote control (if you don't have it, just use the timer) to take the photo.
- Another word of advice: with this high exposures during the day, the slightest amount of light that reaches the sensor from anywhere else than the filter itself will ruin the photo. You must take vary care with the viewfinder (cover it with the appropriate cap) and the space around the filter holder (this one I didn't managed to do it very well - my last idea was to use the upper side of a sock - the elastic part - cut off from the rest of it, until I get a fabric ring that will, hopefully, prevent any light from reaching the lens. I hadn't tried it yet).
So, I took a couple shots (they require some time of preparing) and moved on to another spot.

Equipment / Technical Info
Nikon D80
Sigma 10-20mm F4-5.6 EX DC
Hitech 85 ND 3.0 filter
Slik Pro 340DX tripod

Shutter Speed: 30/1 second
Aperture: F/22.0
Focal Length: 12 mm
ISO Speed: 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. Even this one, if you look at it, it's badly exposed and has lots of flare from the light that come from the filter holder holes. Also the colors are quite strange, with the Magentas very high. The latest is a characteristic of this filters: don't care too much with the White Balance or the colors when you are taking the shot. They will never be closer to the real ones. So, I had two alternatives: I could try to fix the colors or I would convert the photo to Black & White. Usually the later is the preferred for it's simplicity. In this photo I went that path.
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 increased the Highlight Recovery and the Contrast. Then I applied the "Matt's 300 Look - Strong" preset (you can find it here: http://www.lightroomkillertips.com/2008/monday-presets-the-300-look) and converted the resulting image to Grayscale. Finally I've increased the Contrast a bit more and moved on to CS4.
In CS4, I've done: Auto Tone, Auto Contrast, Auto Color and Auto Levels. Then I converted to Black and White (Red Filter preset) and increased the Contrast again. 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
I'm not that happy with result to be honest, but for some reason (probably the impact of it) this photo is very popular among my viewers.

Final Photo


Link to image
http://jpgmn.deviantart.com/art/Rossio-118904515

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