Partial image-blocking.

Forums › Digital Imaging › Partial image-blocking.

stevenz

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#90779 29-Sep-2011 11:02

I remember seeing a couple of shots a fair while ago where they'd taken a shot of a darkish landscape with a longer exposure (6-10 seconds or thereabouts) but didn't want the sky to overexpose so blocked it out for some of the exposure with a businesscard or somesuch.

I've had a couple of shots of doing the same thing but it always ends up being noticable rather than looking "natural".

Does anyone know what I'm going on about and have any tips?

I can see if I can find the shot(s) somewhere.

@KnightNZ

timmmay

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#527118 29-Sep-2011 11:04

That sounds like a pretty budget way of doing things. If you want to get it right in camera you can use an ND filter, but other options are HDR and multiple exposures.

stevenz

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#527124 29-Sep-2011 11:19

Hmm, that does sound like a better option, my camera has a native dual-exposure setting that might work with that kind of thing. I spent some time yesterday (mental health day) playing around on the rocks around the southern bays in Wellington, getting some good shots of breaking waves and some rock-shadows, there is a big hole in a rock wall I'm going to have fun with.

Having fun experimenting with the polarising filter too, can get some quite cool effects with it.

Getting used to the camera, it stays in full-manual mode pretty much all the time now and I got some good shots before a rogue wave got the rock I was sitting on :)

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Disrespective

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#527156 29-Sep-2011 12:21

I've used a similar technique to this before to take images of fireworks. You set the camera to a long exposure, ~15sec, place a black card in front of the lens, wait for the pop of the firework being shot into the air, remove the card and wait for the explosion, replace the card and repeat for the length of time required to get a total exposure time that works for the other settings.

It lets you get more than one firework explosion on the image but is finnicky with the timing and practice is required for every situation as the lighting changes and ttl doesn't work obviously.

Raikyn

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#527320 29-Sep-2011 17:02

A GND(graduated neutral density) filter is probably the easiest way to stop the sky from blowing out. You can get them in various strengths. I usually just use HDR though.

Linuxluver

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#527324 29-Sep-2011 17:08

stevenz: I remember seeing a couple of shots a fair while ago where they'd taken a shot of a darkish landscape with a longer exposure (6-10 seconds or thereabouts) but didn't want the sky to overexpose so blocked it out for some of the exposure with a businesscard or somesuch.

I've had a couple of shots of doing the same thing but it always ends up being noticable rather than looking "natural".

Does anyone know what I'm going on about and have any tips?

I can see if I can find the shot(s) somewhere.

My daughter does this sort of stuff after in GIMP using fuzzy "brushes". They allow you to blend the boundaries more so it doesn't look so....spraypainted. :-)

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Talkiet

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#527342 29-Sep-2011 17:33

Graduated ND filter is the way to do for this... The downside is they are finicky to work with sometimes. You _could_ achieve much of the same result shooting RAW and applying the filter in a raw developing program like Lightroom (which specifically has a grad filter that works on RAW)

This is a pretty extreme example... Without the digital grad ND filter, the sky would have been completely white. I would have gotten a better result with my Grad ND but I didn't have it with me...

Cheers - N

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