Blue Hour Water

Blue Hour Water - using a ND filter
This could look like ice, but it isn't, it is a long exposure of water on a fairly windy day. It's in a narrow bay, the waves don't get big, but they had a little white foam on top. I took this photo using a tripod and because it was very windy, I dug the leggs into the sand on the beach. Otherwise the camera wasn't steady enough for a long exposure.

But how to get a long exposure of 20 seconds around sunset? I did three things:

1) First of all I turned the ISO down to 100. If I had shot it at ISO 200, the exposure time would have been cut in half to 10 seconds, and at ISO 400 only 5 seconds. So to maximize the exposure time I set it to the lowest ISO I could, which was ISO 100.

2) Then I also set the f-stop low (remember that low f-stops are high values) - I had it at f/16. Had I shot it at f/4, which is the highest f-stop the lens will go to, I would also have cut the shutter speed in half a few times. That's why you call a lens that has a very high f-stop like f/2.8 or maybe even f/1.4 a fast lens, because it gives shorter shutter times.

3) The last and equally important step was that I attached a Neutral Density Filter (ND filter) to the lens. A ND-filter is like a pair of sunglasses that blocks the light. ND-filters comes in different flavors that are more or less dark. In this case I attached a ND density filter that stopped down the light two full Exposure Value Steps. Or in plain english it doubled the shutter speed twice, which brought the shutter speed from 5 seconds to 20 seconds.

And that is how I made the water look this way. It came as surprise to myself, that it looked like ice, I had anticipated a smokey look on the water. But I guess it comes from the fact, that it is shot in the blue hour, which adds a blue color to the water.

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