Mosquitoes swarm relentlessly around us as we walk the short distance through a forested area to the Yampa River behind our campsite. We are covered in bug repellant. Still the mosquitos buzzing around our heads are an unpleasant distraction. We go down a steep bank with the aid of a rope tied to a tree, getting onto a sandbar in the river. We are shooting sunset photographs at this location our first evening in Echo Park.
As usual, when shooting in a canyon, the late day light illuminates only a portion of the canyon wall.
The light on the far canyon wall reflects into the river with just a sliver at the edge of the sandbar.
The top edge of the cliff side to the right of Steamboat Rock gets only a small wedge of late day sunset light.
I make a number of shots, capturing the sunset highlights and the reflections in the river.
To smooth the ripples in the river, I use a seven stop neutral density filter and a long exposure.
Each time I change the composition, I acquire a shot with a 3 stop soft graduated neutral density filter to balance the foreground and sky exposure, then add the seven stop ND for a long exposure.
I like the way the long exposure shows the motion of the river current in the photo above. By the time these last two images are made, the golden hour light is gone, so we call it a day. We venture once again through the mosquito infested woods back to our campsite.
We are looking forward to a sunrise shoot tomorrow.
Until then,
Ken
Oh! I don’t like mosquitoes! Believe it or not, I have never used a neutral density filter but then again, I take very few landscape photos. Love how it smooths the water out.
Shutterpug, I do not like mosquitoes, either. Just hearing a single one buzzing around disturbs me and swarms are definitely irritating. I have at least one shot taken during this shoot with a blurry mosquito in the shot. I sometimes have to remove mosquitoes from the photos in post processing. There may be more that I did not notice, but they might show up in an enlargement.
I first started using neutral density filters to shoot waterfalls, so that I could use a slow enough shutter speed to blur the water to make that silky look. They can also be used for long exposures with clouds moving across the sky to get special effects. I probably should do more of the long exposure shots, I just tend to forget about that aspect of shooting, when shooting most landscapes. The long exposures work well when the light is already not too bright, so an overcast day with moving clouds would be a good time to shoot a long exposure landscape.
I almost always use a graduated neutral density filter for balancing exposure. I have recently seen photography advise, where a photographer prefers exposure blending of multiple shots, rather than use a GND filter; but if there are moving objects in the photo, that technique usually does not work well. Probably, many of my photos of rocks and sky would be fine for exposure blending. Just something else to think about and try to apply. Filters and filter holders add more things to carry around and care for during a shoot. The holders and filters are expensive, the filters scratch and/or break easily, filters are not easy to keep clean and dust free, filters can leave obvious lines across an image, might result in undesirable reflections and take time to use. So exposure blending is certainly worth trying, but that means more post processing work, more time in front of a computer screen, which I do not enjoy.