Catching a Falling Star

There I was at Point Clark, Ontario on the edge of Lake Huron with a friend, innocently taking a time lapse sequence of the gorgeous night sky. Just a few frames from the end of my 150-frame sequence, probably the brightest meteor I have seen in recent years streaked across the sky.

Since I was shooting 20-second exposures at ISO 3200, there was plenty of opportunity for the meteor’s short life span to be captured. I was just lucky, however, that it didn’t perform its burnout while my camera was taking a 5-second breather between shots.

My intent that night was to capture the elusive Milky Way. Not only did I get the best shots ever of the MW and its bright core, but to capture it and a meteor in one shot?….Serendipity.

Tick that box on my bucket list.

TRY TIME EXPOSURES FOR ETHEREAL EFFECTS

When we think about taking long exposures with a camera, night time images usually come to mind. Only dark conditions generally call for slow shutter speeds, right?

True-but there is a way to take time exposures in broad daylight...with surprising results.

So the first question that comes to mind is: how do you take a long exposure in bright light? Won’t the camera try to set a fast shutter speed to ensure that the exposure is correct, regardless of how small the aperture is set?

Then there’s the other question: why would you want to take long exposures in daytime, anyway?

OK - a long time exposure (keeping the camera’s shutter open for a long time – from seconds to minutes) will occur when:

• Light level is very low
• A very small aperture is chosen, and
• ISO is set to the lowest value that the camera will allow.

So, to answer the first question, you need to simulate low light conditions by giving your camera dark sunglasses. The device that will do this is an inexpensive thread-on piece of glass called a neutral density (ND) filter. These filters come in a wide variety of grades and are either specified in ‘stops’ or ‘times’.  They are also available as variable grade versions, often referred to as Fader NDs. Be sure to buy one that has the same filter thread diameter as your lens.

A one-stop (or two times) ND filter, with aperture and ISO remaining the same, will require that you force the shutter to stay open twice as long to get the same exposure as you would without the filter. Similarly, a two-stop filter will require slowing the shutter by four times, since a stop means a factor of two in exposure. For the kind of images I’m proposing we take, you will need a ten-stop filter in order to get exposures that are minutes long. This is equivalent to increasing exposure by a factor of 1024 times, but is usually referred to as a 1000 times filter.

Why minutes? Well, in answer to the second question above, anything moving (water, clouds) will take on a foggy (in the case of waves) or streaky (in the case of clouds) look. As long as you have stationary elements in the scene, such as rocks, ground and a tree trunk in the sample shots shown in this post, the viewer is confronted with a paradox that doesn’t appear ‘natural’. This makes for a more interesting image than if you had captured the same scene with a shutter speed of, say, 1/250^th of a second. While these images were shot in colour, I converted them to black and white, since they tend to look more dramatic that way.

And now for the practical considerations. You will need:

• A stable tripod
• A remote shutter release that plugs into your camera, since you can’t hold down the shutter button on your camera for minutes without jarring it. You can also get an intervalometer, which allows you to set a specific time interval without having to manually time the shutter.
• A camera with a Manual mode that will allow you to set the shutter to ‘Bulb’, or one that has a dedicated Bulb mode.
• A day with calm winds, so that your tripod doesn’t get buffeted during the exposure.

Look for a scene that has a combination of moving and stationary components. Getting the right exposure is definitely going to take some experimentation. As a starting point, set your camera’s ISO to the lowest value it provides. This is typically 100. Do NOT use Auto ISO. In Manual / Bulb mode, set the aperture to a value anywhere in the range of f/16 to f/22. This will depend on whether it’s an overcast or sunny day. You should get exposures in the range of 2 to 4 minutes. Use the histogram to confirm good exposure and tweak the time (or aperture) as needed to get perfect exposure or desired motion effect.

With digital SLRs, a practical consideration is the heating of the sensor during long exposures. While it won’t damage the camera, this heating tends to amplify what are often referred to as ‘stuck pixels’. Every camera has them, and they appear as unexpected bright spots on the final image.

To combat this, DSLRs generally have a long exposure noise reduction setting which can mitigate this annoyance. Unfortunately, it requires that the camera will make you wait twice as long to see your image, since it takes as long again as the exposure time to process out the stuck pixels. This could result in an 8 minute wait until you take the next shot. While this technique is effective, I prefer to take my chances and fix the spots after in either Lightroom or Photoshop.

By way of a summary, here are the steps I take:

1. Set up the camera on the tripod and compose the scene with the chosen lens.
2. Ensure ISO is at its lowest setting, and choose a small aperture to help force a long exposure and to give me the depth of field I want.
3. Plug in the remote shutter release or intervalometer (and set it to the exposure time I want).
4. Thread on the ten-stop ND filter, being careful not to disturb focal length or focus settings.
5. Cover up the eyepiece if the sun is behind me, to prevent light leak onto the image (it has happened to me!)
6. Check my image and histogram, rinse and repeat until I get the right exposure and effect.

It’s a slow process that requires patience. At the end of it though, you will get images that will be set apart from the ordinary.

Extending Summer, Photographically

At this time of year, most of us are in denial that the long days, warm evenings and cricket sounds at night are soon going to fade into the cool of autumn.  While the change is inevitable, it’s nice to capture that summer feeling in our art and keep it in our walls year 'round. 

For me, the image shown here (Far and Away) brings on the warmth and color of the midsummer evening. This was shot with a long lens trained on a small island in Lake Erie. The trees almost seem to float above the water because the surface of the lake was calm around the island's shore.  A light ripple from the evening breeze creates a cyan reflection of the sky in the water in between, while the inshore water calms again and reflects the alpenglow-like color above the horizon. 

Swallows were constantly swooping over the lake surface, seeking mosquitoes for the evening meal. Waiting for them to get out of the frame required a bit of patience, but their presence was welcome nonetheless.  

To help visitors to my web site extend their summer by putting such scenes on their walls, I am offering a 20% discount until the end of September 2012.

Please go to http://bit.ly/SUswgc and simply use Discount Code PKGNDY at checkout. The discount can be used for any image on the web site.

Crazy Composite

I've always had this scene in my mind whenever I've heard the song 'Crazy River' by Robbie Robertson, so I decided to build a composite image of my interpretation.

First, I shot an empty field toward sunset. Easy peasy. Because I wanted to give it a Louisiana bayou atmosphere, I figured it needed a big lazy moon. No problem - I had one on a slide. And stars came from a time exposure I shot weeks earlier. A bit of artistic license led to the meteor (or comet if you wish).

Robbie called for an abandoned '59 Chevy. Fat chance finding one of those, so I ordered a scale diecast model for $10 on Ebay. A bit of watercolour paint dabbed on it emulated the rust. To make it look like the car battery had been fiddled with to make the car radio work (so the occupant could listen to Little Willie John), I propped up the hood and lit up a yellow LED on the front seat to make it look like the dash was illuminated. A strobe with a blue filter emulated moonlight along the car's side.

The occupant lying in the back seat had to be created. I've never hired a model and wasn't about to for a personal project, so I was it. With a remote shutter trigger in hand, and side lit by an orange-filtered strobe, I became Robbie's character.

Using lots of layers and layer masks in Photoshop®, I built my composite using the field as a background. A deep blue photo filter layer converted the daylight field to a nighttime field. The masks were used for making the grass appear to be growing around the car and placing the appropriate parts of my body in the back seat. The burn tool added the car's shadow onto the grass. Matching the car to the surroundings was probably the trickiest part, involving a lot of edge smoothing using that layer's mask.

It took many hours to create, but was a great learning experience. One takeaway on big projects like this is to save your work as different (layered) files as you progress, so that you can always go back and rebuild if you really mess up.