Main Menu

Tuesday, December 9, 2014

Ghost Houses at Sandy Hook - Long Exposure


The abandoned houses at Sandy Hook Beach, NJ are a great location to photograph. The image above was taken with a 10-stop ND filter and a wide angle lens.

Most people tend to have underexposed shots when shooting with an ND filter on, especially if the ND filter is a 6 to 10 stop light blocker. The reason being that the camera sensor cannot process the light intensity with strong light stoppers. There are three solutions to this:

  1. Trial and error - Keep aperture and ISO constant and vary the exposure until you are satisfied with the result.
  2. Exposure chart - Keep the aperture and ISO constant expose without the filter - meter for the scene by adjusting the shutter speed. Then use this shutter speed to figure out what to change it to using the ND filter Exposure chart (Link), 
  3. LCD screen - The easiest of the three solutions - Turn on live view mode on your camera and adjust the shutter speed to your satisfaction. 
Since the 10stop filter blocks so much light - it is impossible to view and compose an image through the view finder, I usually resort to live view mode most of the time.

Camera settings: ISO100, f/16, 30s  

6 comments:

  1. Ghost Houses at Sand Hook - Long Exposure

    ReplyDelete
  2. I was wondering how the shot would look without the tree in the foreground. But i think It adds to the spookiness :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. I took a shot without the tree in front but the image looked blend...the tree mainly was for framing the scene...

    ReplyDelete
  4. Hi
    This is very nice blog sharing very useful information. iqphoto offers best San Francisco City Hall Wedding Photographer

    ReplyDelete
  5. gain your knowledge and develop your writing skill with us

    ReplyDelete
  6. Looks fantastic but I wonder if it don't be scary to be at those ghost houses. They area abandoned so their might really be ghosts in there.

    Scott Porter (Bio-Identical Hormone Replacement Therapy)

    ReplyDelete