Recipe 7 : Water (long exposure)

This recipe can be used for to create a dreamy, blurry effect in any water body. Since I have mostly visited beaches, I have tried it on beaches… Rocky ones. It wouldn’t be any fun on normal beaches. So find yourself a rocky beach or a waterfall for this one to work.

Equipment:

• Camera. Needs manual control.
  You will be using shutter speeds from 1 sec to about 8 sec. So make sure your camera can let you do that.
• Tripod. NOT optional for this one.
  You might find a rock to rest your camera on but really you should be carrying a good sturdy tripod for this one.
• Zoom Lens. Optional but recommended.
  Surprised? Well I’ll explain it below.
• Polarizer Filter

Technique:

1. Set your tripod and camera up on a decent piece of beach or rock. Remember that the waves will be crashing into the rocks. Make sure you set your equipment up in a place where it won’t get wet.
2. Set your ISO to the lowest possible.
3. Set your shutter speed to 4 seconds.
4. You can let the camera determine the aperture or play with it in manual.
5. Now I recommend a zoom lens here so that you can play with various compositions. A wide angle view will look completely different from a telephoto view of a single rock. So try a lot of different compositions.
6. Now if you remember the daylight beach recipe, use your polarizer to give you one of the two effects.
   White Water + Detailed sky OR Colored Water + Washed out sky.
7. FCCR of course!

Tips:

• Make sure you have a fully charged battery when you try this out.
  I say this for two reasons. Firstly because the battery drains out relatively faster because of the long exposures. Secondly, the best time to do this is just after sunset so its highly likely that you have used up most of your battery in shooting all day!
• Over expose the images a bit.
  This is a general rule fo thumb for any photograph because the camera captures more information on the brighter side of the histogram. (This is a fairly advanced concept. Just swing with it for now or google it. I’ll cover it someday I suppose)
• Play with different shutter speeds to capture various amount of blur in the water.
  Lower the shutter speed, higher the blur.