I went out early this morning to capture a scene I had been thinking about for awhile. I didn’t need to get up very early, since the site I had in mind is close to home. I set up my tripod and camera on the bank of the Bow River just upstream of the bridge in the centre of town at about 5:45 am, a few minutes before the sun’s light cleared the mountain peaks to the east. I was anticipating a nice orange glow on the tip of Mount Rundle from the sun’s early rays. A few minutes later I wasn’t disappointed.
I captured a few good pictures and I’ll display two of them today. They are both essentially the same with the main difference being the duration of the exposure. I’ll begin with the shorter exposure, 4/10 sec. This is the more conventional view, what you would observe standing there. The exposure at .4 sec is still relatively long but not so long as to lose the turbulence on the water’s surface. I could have shortened the exposure further to better “freeze”the water’s motion but the image as captured is a faithful representation of how the water in this scene appeared.
I repeated the shot with the intention of “smoothing” the look of the flowing water. This look is a bit of an abstraction but it can be appealing. The technique is to prolong the exposure. The shutter remains open while the water keeps moving, blurring the stream and creating a “smoothed” appearance. To do this, I affixed a 9 f-stop, neutral density filter to my lens which seriously impedes the rate of light reaching the camera’s sensor. The filter’s glass is so dark you cannot see through it and the camera will not auto-focus as a consequence. It becomes necessary to focus the lens before attaching the filter. Despite the opacity of the filter, the light does get through, albeit slowly and exposes the camera’s sensor. Here’s how the 8 second exposure looks.
The stream is very “smoothed”. You can still sense the motion but it looks like a slow moving, viscous liquid. Flowing, blue ketchup! Everything that’s not moving looks the same, of course.
Fabulous. Of course, life favours the prepared and your photographer’s eye had already visualized these photographs. I particularly like the very long exposure. Nice work.