The Daily Snap – June 17

©Darwin Wiggett

This snapshot of my camera set-up shows how I am doing long exposures with my Canon EOS-1ds Mark III. First I set up my composition with no filters in place. I used my 24mm TS-E lens for a wide-angle view. I manually focused 1/3rd of the way into the scene, and then tilted the lens into the plane of cracked earth until both the foreground and the background looked sharp (I used Live View to check sharpness). I then put my lens at f10. I normally use some aperture between f 8 and f11 with my 24mm lens (these are the sharpest apertures with this lens). Then I placed a Singh-Ray LB Polarizer into the first slot of the Cokin Z-pro filter holder. Next I placed a two-stop hard edge Singh-Ray grad in the furthest slot on the Z-Pro holder to hold back exposure in the sky. I took a meter reading and got an exposure of 1/8th of a second. I then placed the Lee “Big Stopper” (10 stop ND filter) into the middle slot of the Cokin holder and wrapped a black velvet cloth over the filters and filter holder – see shot above. This cloth prevents stray light from bouncing around between the filters which would cause the image to go ‘milky’ during long exposure. Finally I set my camera to bulb and made an exposure of 2 minutes at f10 (10 stops longer than the 1-8th second exposure) using a cable release. The resulting photo of Abraham Lake (in spring) looks like this:

©Darwin Wiggett - Canon EOS-1ds Mark III

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The Weekly Photo – April 9

©Darwin Wiggett

All of Alberta has been crazy windy the last few days. Rather than fight the wind, why not go out and make long exposures to capture the wind movement? Here I used my Rebel XSi, a 70-200mm lens, a Singh-Ray LB polarizer and Singh-Ray 5-stop ND filter to get an 8 second exposure on a cloudy and windy day. The painterly effect of the blowing grass is really lovely and the photo looks great as a big print. To see a larger version just click on the photo.

New Article, New Gear

Singh-Ray now has a larger version of its sprocketed LB Polarizer that will drop into either a Lee holder or a Cokin Z-Pro holder. If you are using one of these larger filter holders this means that you now have more choices in polarizers beyond the Cokin Z-164 Circular Polarizer or the Lee Polarizer. I find the Cokin polarizer to be very dark and it has a stong blue cast. I find the Lee polarizer to be a pain to use with the Lee holder. The Singh-Ray LB Warming Polarizer solves both problems (it is bright and warm) and slips easily into the Cokin Z-Pro holder. This larger filter works great with the large holders to use with lenses that have a large front filter thread (e.g. 77mm or larger) and to use with ultra wide angle zoom lenses like a 16-35mm lens on a full frame camera or a 10-22mm lens on an APS-sized camera. To learn more about my thoughts on this new filter and to see the latest images I made with the filter go here.

Also related to super wide angle lenses, if you have a Canon 17mm TS-E or a Nikon 14-24mm (both with bulging front lens elements), Lee has announced plans to make a filter holder that might work with these lenses – check it out here – hmmm looks interesting but would involve buying another size of grads – my wallet is already thin enough! Some other filter holder inventions for these lenses include this one for Nikon, this one for Canon… and I am sure there are lots more out there… heck I am messing around with my own MacGyver rig for the 17mm TS-E. Stay tuned.

Cokin Z-Pro Holder on left with LB Polarizer and Grad (P-holder on right)

Weekly Photo – Jan 29

©Darwin Wiggett - Canon EOS-1ds Mark III, 24mm TS-E Lens

This one is from the North Saskatchewan River at Graveyard Flats. I found this rock with a trailing bunch of algae that reminded me of Cousin Itt from the Addams Family. I liked the contrast of green with the cool blues of this wintery scene. To get this photo I used my 24mm tilt-shift lens tilted to give maximum depth-of-field. I used a Singh-Ray LB Warming Polarizer to cut glare off the water and darken the blue sky and a Singh-Ray 3-stop soft-edge grad to even out exposure from top to bottom. Check out the photo below for how the picture looked without filters. I love my filters for the optimum in-camera capture quality possible!

©Darwin Wiggett - same photo with no filters