Wilderness Lodge at Night

jbwolffiv

jbwolffiv

Member
So this is a shot from the first summer I had my DSLR, and as you can see the lights behind the waterfall are WAY blown out. ; Any advice on how to capture this better? ; I am thinking a ND filter, but not sure.


Wilderness Lodge by jbwolffiv, on Flickr
 
yes, that shot absolutely needs a multi stop nd filter, and take a bunch at maybe 2 second intervals to see what works, i cannot think of any other way without that filter
 
Neat. I have another idea. ; I don't own a nd filter, so I would be timing my shot just after sunset to capture some blue light sky. I would then take several shots at many different f-stops to see which one gave me the best shutter speed for the falls.
I don't know if that would work, but I'd have fun out there trying!


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It looks like you also had a pretty big aperture at F3.5, and a 5 second exposure. ; Knocking the aperture down, and running the shutter longer would have reduced the impact of that bright light, while the longer exposure would help expose the dimmer areas. ; F8 to F11 probably would have been pretty solid, with the exposure longer at 15 seconds or so. ; If unsure, Aperture Priority works nicely for night shots - set the aperture to control the bright spots, let the camera choose the shutter length - if it comes out a wee bit dark or light, just dial in a little EV compensation and shoot it again.

Another approach would be to take multiple exposures - 2 or 3 shots - and stack them HDR style to expose the highs, mids, and shadows seperately. ; You don't have to process it with the heavy tone-mapping look if you don't want to - HDR can look 100% natural but just allow you to capture extreme dynamic range in a single shot.
 
Thanks so much for the ideas! ; I know if I was doing this today I would be sure my aperture would be more like f/8 or f/11, total rookie mistake back in 2007. ; I am pretty sure I was running around taking shots figuring they would be awesome since I was using a DSLR, but I forgot all the stuff I learned in HS about aperture. ; Thanks again, I hope to get a chance to try all these this summer and look for which works the best.
 
do you have an nd filter?? if not save up and get one, it need not be too expensive, maybe save up for one of the kits from b&h, that would give you 2-3 filters, in a nice varied range, nd filters are a real good item to have at wdw, i'm starting to appreciate mine more and more each trip.


and i forgot to mention, always, always get them in 77mm thread, you can use step down rings, those are as cheap as $4 but you can't make a too small filter fit a 2.8 lens no matter what you try
 
"gary" said:
do you have an nd filter?? if not save up and get one, it need not be too expensive, maybe save up for one of the kits from b&h, that would give you 2-3 filters, in a nice varied range, nd filters are a real good item to have at wdw, i'm starting to appreciate mine more and more each trip.


and i forgot to mention, always, always get them in 77mm thread, you can use step down rings, those are as cheap as $4 but you can't make a too small filter fit a 2.8 lens no matter what you try
Click to expand...

Thanks Gary! ; I am going to give that a try. ; I do have an ND filter, and I got it at 77mm too (and the step down rings for all my lenses! ; Some dude that has all these funny t-shirts suggested that to me last summer. ; If I could only remember his name.....
 
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