Thursday, August 02, 2007

sometimes you get lucky

I stumbled onto this scene a couple nights by sheer luck while en route to an engagement. With only a couple of minutes to spare, I setup and shot quickly. Two Singh-Ray filters were key to capturing what I saw: a warming circular polarizer to cut glare and improve saturation, and a 4x6" ND grad angled to hold back the bright sky and water.

I first tried the 3-stop soft-edge grad, but it wasn't holding the water back enough, so I opted for the 3-stop hard edge. I was worried the gradation of the hard edge was going to show in the image, but the gradation on the larger 4x6" sized filters is better than on the smaller versions - and it blended perfectly.
EOS 1DSm2; EF 17-40mm

Sunset over canoe on Cyprus Lake, in Bruce Peninsula National Park.


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4 comments:

  1. Craig8:00 PM

    Nice shot, thanks for the technicals.

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  2. Anonymous8:34 PM

    One of your very best I think ! Do you think you could have achieved this shot using HDR with no filters?

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  3. Ethan Meleg9:15 PM

    Thanks for the kind words! To handle the wide exposure situation I could indeed have used HDR [High Dynamic Range....essentially taking multiple exposures of the same image and blending them together in Photoshop]. But I'm still a bit of a purist - I like to get it right in the field and save myself that extra bit of post-processing time!

    As for the polarizer - that result is not easily achieved in Photoshop.

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  4. Craig6:42 PM

    It's rare that I see HDR's that looks as natural as filtered shots.

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