Hamburg Alster Lake / sunset photography session Top

A few days ago I managed to get my 150mm filters to finally do some long exposure photography with my Olympus 7-14mm f2.8 Pro lens. But unfortunately I live in northern Germany, not too famous of amazing weather. After a few more days of wait, finally the sun came through. While it was still quite cold (about 5°C with freezing wind), the sunset was stunning. I did manage to get one nice shot out of it and recorded a video of that.

One of my outtakes, you could say, were the first attempts. I shot at f5.6 but since I used an additional Haida ND1.8 (64x) filter, I had a total slow-down of 64.000 times. I was exposing for a full 4 minutes and still only managed to get it to be this bright:

failed attempt at 240 seconds

Extremely underexposed. No doubt, still an interesting shot, but it was way too underexposed to be usable. Hence I removed the 64x filter and stuck to the Haida ND3.0 (1000x) filter, together with a NiSi Reverse GND0.9 (8x) filter.

This time I took a 30 second exposure at f5.6. Since I was using the ND + GND filters, it allowed me to capture a nice gradient on the sky, expose for such a long time despite the strong sun, get silky smooth water and still have the foreground properly exposed.

This is how it looked straight out of camera:

straight out of camera

As you can see, it came out pretty amazing and only needed some light retouching in Lightroom to bring out the colours and take advantage the dynamic range that the RAW file provided.

You can see the final picture here on flickr:

filtered spring sunset

 

Equipment used:


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