Long shutter time exposures in daylight

PaulieC

Hi all,

This is something I've wanted to try out for a while (talking about ~30 seconds) - I love the kind of dreamlike quality you get, not to mention being able to expose without the worry of having people and traffic etc get in the way.
Anyway the point of the post is this: does anyone know of any photo shops that sell ND filters (-10 or 20 stops) ? Lots of places do the -1 or -2 stops Filters. The only place that I can find that does them is B&H, but I prefer to buy in shops if I can

Thanks
cambo

Redundo

Plus 1's, 2's and 3's are by far the most common, anything else would be quite rare.

You can stack them of course; put a couple of +3's together, stop down the lens aperture and that should do it for you.

PaulieC

would stacked filters not cause vignetting?

digitalage

I have an 8 stop ND filter and I have got exposures over 30s during the daytime, I used it in combination with a polarisor filter which stops about 2 stops, then using iso 50 and f16 you can achive 30s. It also depends on the quality of light during the day, a cloudy day will allow you more than 30s. With the ND and polarisor on the lens its so dark that you won't be able to see through the lens, so I recommend composing your shot then attach the filters. Also the way to get around vignetting of stacked filters for example use a step up filter say 49mm to 58mm, then attach a 58mm ND, polarisor, etc.

PaulieC

excellent, thanks for the info. Now, jsut have to figure out where to get the filter

Redundo

I was thinking more of the Cokin system of filters. The filter holder can take up to three filters without any vignetting and you can still use a polarizer with that.

redrob13

I use a Hoya ND400 filter to get fairly long exposures in daylight, anything from 15 to 99 seconds + in the middle of the day ... depends on the conditions really. As digitalage says, you definitely need to compose first and then attach the filter.

I tried getting the filter in a shop, I spend a day going around all the camera places in town (well most of them anyway), none of them had heard of such a thing and in a couple I was practically laughed at for suggesting that it might exist! But maybe you'll have better luck.

I got mine from www.2filter.com, it's about half way down this page. They don't have the most convenient ordering system, but I've never had any problems with the stuff I've gotten from them.

If you're interested you can see some of my results from using the filter, here, here, and here.

Hope that helps,
Robert