Clearing Storm —
Sunset through a clearing thunderstorm at the Sister Bay Yacht Club’s marina. Sister Bay, Wisconsin.
We’ve just returned from a weeklong vacation to Door County, Wisconsin with Jenny’s parents and somewhat staggered visits from her aunts/uncles/cousins. (And for once “just” is actually timely — my queue is used up and I’m writing this the day before it’ll post!). One of the Door County traditions with the Talls is to take in the sunset every evening, and sunset photos are a popular activity.
Being somewhat excessive about such things (photos, that is), I ended up lugging the tripod out every night and taking a variety of pictures before, during, and after sunset. Along with the camera and tripod, I brought a new addition to my filter collection: an NDX filter (i.e. a 10-stop neutral density filter).
For non-photo-geeks, a neutral–density filter reduces the light entering the camera without changing the color. Neutral density filters are rated by the number of f–stops (or just stops) of light they filter. f-stops are factors of 2, meaning a 10-stop difference changes the amount of light by a factor of 2^10, or 1024.
In the case of a neutral density filter, that means 1024 times less light entering the camera, so I need to use a shutter speed 1024 times longer to get the same exposure. So a scene that would normally require a shutter speed of 1/40th-second becomes nearly a 30-second exposure. For artistic reasons you often want longer shutter speeds (smoothing out the motion in water, in particular). In this case I used a 30-second exposure to wipe out any movement in the water of the marina and enhance the serenity of the clouds and sunset light.