OK, maybe not true abstracts, but bending in that direction. I spent a bit of time this afternoon looking to do some long-exposure work with the river – in broad daylight…
My goal is to continue to explore the boundary between the surface and what lies below and that requires some interesting lighting conditions and ways of visually working into the water column without getting too wet in the process.
The really cool part of these images, for me, only appears in good-size prints. The water’s surface is inscribed with patterns of light so as you pull back you see what is below but upon closer inspection you can tell that there is a layer of water above (see zoomed inset below).
Technical stuff: Canon 5D Mark 2, 24-70mm f/2.8L, exposure times vary but generally around 10 seconds, f/18 to f/22, ISO 100, 3 stop ND filter stacked with 2 polarizers. I believe the first image was done with the ND filter, polarizer and a 3-stop graduated ND filter running left to right. Lightroom processing varies slightly between images but generally fill +10, black +9, vibrance +5-+15, strong contrast curve. Some of the images pulled down the saturation of the red and orange channels to remove some color casting caused, no doubt, by the mass of filters piled up in front of the lens. (That these photos work in color at all was pretty amazing. I was expecting a lot more skewing of colors.)
