Blue Shades

My name is Rob, and I wear my sunglasses at night. So I can...

So I can...

Whatever, you know the song.

It should come as no surprise to you that I like night time photography and long exposures. The longer the better.

With a sufficiently long enough exposure you can turn night time into day time.

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What happens when you wanna go even longer?

Well, highlights start to get blown out, and you lose detail everywhere. Unless you have a pair of sunglasses.

A neutral density filter acts as a pair of sunglasses for a camera. It blocks a certain amount of light from passing through without affecting color.

This means a number of things, all related to the exposure triangle, which I'll touch on more next week.

For a lot of people, it means you can make amazing pictures of waterfalls during the day, not unlike this

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That's not taken with an ND filter, but it gives you an idea. That's only a 1/4 second exposure during the day. With my ND filter, that same shot would have been captured with a 4 second exposure, all other things being equal.

When you apply this to a shot at night time, things tend to go a little bit bonkers.

I just got to play with my ND filter at night for the first time a few weeks ago. I ventured out to Big Spring Park, one of my favorite spots.

When I got there, I noticed that the spring was lit up blue for Autism Awareness Month. Having a bit of a novelty to it, I decided to set up camp there.

After some back of the napkin calculations, I determined that the shutter speed I needed given the aperture and ISO I wanted to use was 160 seconds. That's not a typo, not 1/160 of a second. 2 minutes and 40 seconds.

This is what I ended up with:

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Notice that the water almost looks like glass? That's the effect I was after, and could only be accomplished through use of my sunglasses.

If you want to zoom in even more, you can download a larger version of the image here.