I had the opportunity yesterday to take photos of a beautiful waterfall and river on a sunny day. I was trying to get the blurring effect with a slow shutter speed, but was finding it very hard as my camera has a minimum sensitivity of ISO200 (ok, you can stop laughing now).
Now I didn't have any ND filters on me - what other options are there? Could I have use some negative exposure compensation and then slowed the shutter speed? I tried it but wasn't very successful.
Thoughts anyone?
Actually just thought it through some more - exposure compensation would have altered my exposure value, and thus my photos would have been overexposed, which was the result I got. Bah, back to the drawing board.
Were you already stopped down to the mininum lens aperture?
A polarizer will cut 1 to 1-1/2 stops of light and will also cut glare off the water. And when a polarizer is turned so that it isn't cutting glare, it's basically a light-duty ND filter.
Still, in bright situations you may find even f/32 + polarizer doesn't get you less than a 1/2s exposure, when you may want longer. A stronger ND then becomes a must.
However, one thing I have noted from looking at waterfall images is that many of the most interesting ones are not taken in bright sunlight - often they are in shaded locations.
Hey slej,
Yup, minimum aperture, which unfortunately is only around F9 (non-DSLR digicam you see)...
Agree regarding the shaded locations - unfortunately I was there on a day trip and it so happened that it was a cloudless day. Haha, would have been perfect for the beach...
I'm sympatheitic to the day-trip blues - but Mitch is right of course - bright sunlight is the enemy of waterfall pictures - the best ones are almost always in the shade.
Another thing ND filters are great for is reducing your depth of field, shooting anything outdoors especially with a flash is a pain in bright sunlight (unless you have light modifiers)