Walking back to the car after an afternoon exploring Robin Hood’s Bay and the beach I decided it was a scene that was worthy of an experiment with a new toy my friend John had given me. I had seen many pictures taken in the day with very blurry clouds like this and wondered how it was done. Turns out it is using a “big stopper” filter in front of the lens, that is a ten stop neutral density filter. Basically very dark sunglasses for your camera that cause the shutter speed to be very long (hence the cloud blur). However these filters are over £100 so I found a cheap “solution”. My friend John is a welder and welders wear helmets with dark glass to protect their eyes. John kindly gave me a small square of this glass to experiment with. It made my 1/250th of a second shutter speed into 30 seconds and is the equivalent of a 13 stop neutral density filter. That’s the good news. The bad news is it comes out of the camera looking green (see below), but with RAW image capture and some skills with Lightroom and Photoshop I was able to recover the above photograph. I must try this again in future!
Taking only photographs – leaving only footprints
