The Wheel of Time

I believe this picture needs a little explanation :)

I guess most of the viewers curious about two things: How it is done and what equipment I used?

First about the equipment. It was made with a Pentax K10D with a Tamron Adaptall-2 01BB 24mm f2.5 lens. Personally I love this lens, one of my favourite photos -a HDR called Dreamland - was made with this lens. The lens feels well built and luckily I have a very good copy of it. To achieve this long-long shutter-speed (381 seconds or 6 minutes 21 seconds) I had to greatly reduce the amount of light. To achieve this I used a welding safety glass, reducing the incoming light with 12 EV and on top of that a Cokin ND8 filter (-3EV) to achieve an effective 15 stops longer shutter speed, all packed in a Cokin filter holder with 55mm filter thread adapter. It was put on the top of a Giotto's tripod and used a home made wired remote controller to keep the shutter open for the desired amount of time. I also used a MS-Excel sheet made by me to calculate the shutter speed on my Nokia N97 and used the built in timer function on my other phone, an INQ Mini 3G. I also used my friend, BP, to entertain me while I was waiting for the shot to be made :D

Things you have to be careful about when doing long exposure shots is you have to block the light's way trough the viewfinder as it can effectively ruin your picture. Another issue is the lens casting reflecion on the welding glass, so you can't have the sun at the front of the camera. Luckily in the afternoon the sunlight came from behind. Another issue comes with the Cokin filter system, the light goes in at the sides of the filter holder, so you have to create a kind of shade to eliminate this as it will light the dust particles on the glass creating flares on the picture. This was when the case for my tripod came in, as I used the casing for covering the camera from behind, including the viewfinder and I used it's belt around the filter holder as a sunshade. Looked silly enough but it was effective :) Yet you can still see a little dust-flare on the lower left corner of the picture.

To calculate the correct shutter speed I used a little excel sheet I created earlier. The whole thing is based on the formula for calculating the EV, which is
EV=LOG2(AP^2/SS)-EC
Where is
EV = Exposure Value
AP = Aperture
SS = Shutter Speed
EC = Exposure Compensation (for ISO I used ISO100 as 0, ISO200 as +1, ISO400 as +2, ISO800 as +3... etc. and ND2 as -1, ND4 as -2, ND8 as -3... etc.)

From this you can get the Shutter speed with the formula
SS=(AP^2)/2^(EV+EC)

First I made a test shot without any filters on ISO100, f4 and got a shutter speed of 1/640. This gives an EV of 13,32. So I added the modifiers, such as -15EV and f16 and got a shutter speed of 13 minutes and 39 seconds. As it was cold and the sun was about to go down I've decided to choose half stop faster on aperture so f11 for a bit faster aperture speed. This is how I got the shutter speed of 387 seconds which is 6 minutes 27 seconds. I set the egg-timer on my INQ Mini 3G (which is a great and very cheap phone) for 6'20" and begun the capturing.

The result... well it was green.

The original picture with Auto WB and Auto Tone.

So in Lightroom I was setting the White Balance manually for 5452K / +150. Yes, Tint to +150. A little play with the other values and voila, up there you can see the result :)

Just a side note: The above formula only works with digital cameras as with film you need to add a multiplier because the different nature/system behind film photography.

"True Color" Infrared

In Infrared photography the Hoya R72 (and other filters that cut around 720) is known as "False Color"IR filters. Those filters along with the IR light letting some red light trough as well. Then a little Photoshop (or any other software :P) and you have blue skies and all the goodies.

But based on the experience I shared in my last post I had the idea to use the ND8 filter(s) for IR photography...

Well I love the results :) Even though the weather wasn't the best and -oh well- the trees don't have too many leafs which will make IR photography a bit better, but I still got a couple good results.

Here is the 3 shots I found worthy for sharing. Postprocess is only setting the white balance and a little play with levels.

The ND Anomaly :)

I've decided to make a little test with the ND filters. Since a while now I wanted to find out how 2 (or more) ND filters would act together. What will we get if we put 2 ND8 filters together? Will it be ND16 or ND64? Or maybe something else?

Well finally I found the first clue on E-Bay in the form of a cheap chinese ND8 filter for the Cokin P holder. So spent a few quids on it and tonight I did the test-run myself.

The result is what I expected, which is somewhere near to ND64 which is 6 stops.

Also it turned out that the cheap chinese ND8 filter is about a half stop weaker than the Cokin one and also makes the pictures slightly softer.

But I found out something else as well :) As you can see on the pictures above the 3 ND8 filters together is nowhere near the same colors as the one without the filter. The picture is way more reddish. It's the same thing as I experienced previously with the vario-ND filter, which is the ND filters do not block the IR light. To test it I only needed an IR sensitive camera and as we know most households have one so does mine. So I grabbed my modded Panasonic FZ50 and made a quick test. The result is the Cokin ND8 filter does not block ANY IR light, while the cheap chinese filters reducing with approx. one and quarter (1.38 to be precise) stop.

Now this leaves me to some new ideas in IR photography, as we could use the ND filters stacked together as IR filter in a way... so basically we can let the IR light get to the sensor along with _some_ colors as well, a bit similar to the IR filters that cut around 720 nm, just they will let in _all_ colors instead of just a bit of red.

Just for fun I included my good ol' 11 DIN welding glass. The result is with the K10D it did what I've expected, which is a bit more than 11 stops, well closer to 12 stops (that means it equals an ND4K filter) and it cuts the IR light almost entirely.

Now what I am curious about is: are the other ND filters act like this as well or only the Cokin system ones? I mean what about the Hoya ND400 filter which is about 8.5 stops quite similar to the one where I put the 3 ND8 filters together*? Maybe that's why I only found B&W shots with the ND400 filter? Unfortunately the ND400 filters are expensive so I can't try it myself but if someone has one could share the experience with me :)

* - Theoretically the 3 ND8 filters together should be equal to an ND512 filter.

And now... the test shots:

TEST: CPL + reversed CPL as ND

As many of you know me, I love to do some tests and I always wanted to have a ND filter :) Long ago I made my experiments with 12 DIN wielding mask glasses used as filters but they weren't neutral density. These days I made a try with 2 CPLs (Circular Polar Filters) and had quite good results. Here are my experiences and a result :)

I ordered 2 cheap CPLs with 82mm diameter from Ebay and a step down ring to be able to put it on my CZJ Flektogon 50mm f4. Why this lens? Because I can make Tilt photography with it... so why not mix the two later? :D One of the CPLs got it's glass reversed and that's the one I had to put in front of the 'normal' CPL. These total around a bit more than a tenner... so not that expensive :) I will add a step up ring from 55mm so I can use my Tamron f2.4/24mm and could make long expo IR shots as well :)
So the test setup is: Pentax K10D + PSix->PK Tilt Adapter + CZJ Flektogon 50 + Cheap CPL + Cheap reversed CPL

• The pictures became a little 'contrastless' so shooting in RAW and after editing is necessary.
• Close to 90 degrees difference (where basically the 2 CPLs are 'killing each other') the whole picture turns to be blue...
• The white balance is going off to the cool side (pictures become 'blueish'). Again with after edit it can be corrected.
• The trees becoming 'rusty', it's the same effect I've noticed with Full spectrum photography done with the Panasonic FZ50 (this means both visible and IR light recorded), this makes me believe that IR is getting trough somehow... will make tests with the IR sensitive PanaFZ50 later.
• If I change the order of the filters (reversed on lens and normal CPL on 'light's side') then it doesn't has the darkening effect but still makes this blueish coloring... O.o
  

And here's the test shot (no filter vs filter turned to useable maximum):