I arranged a mini photoshoot at one my my favourite spots this morning. This is my 3rd visit and I took arranged to meet up with two people that had never been there. The spot is Coalcliff near the Sea Cliff Bridge I posted the other day. Although a dawn shot and the weather promised 57% overcast with the chance of a shower developing, it was nothing like that and was quite a fizzer of a sunrise as there was virtually no cloud and the little there was all at the horizon. Even so, I have been putting into good practice what I have learnt recently and extended the shooting time pre-dawn out to 60 seconds at f/6.3 and ISO200. This resulted in a much a lot less noise than my usual underexpose and push to get the details. No bracketing with this shot either. As usual, taken with my Olympus E-P1 and Olympus M.Zuiko 9-18mm however it has been cropped a fair bit so is probably equivalent to around 12mm and it was about 1 hour before official sunrise (and about half-an-hour before "first light").
I always shoot RAW+Large Fine JPEG under those conditions. That image came out of RAW. The JPEGS get used when I am lazy.
It is already a 60 second exposure and I don't have a timer. Also, my locking remote got claimed by the sea a couple of weeks ago so what the self-timer and pre-set shutter speeds cannot do, I cannot do.
Peter, have you experimented with multi-shot high ISO exposures, using something like PhotoAcute to remove the noise? this would give you the flexibility of short exposures without the noise, where you think it useful. Cheers Brian
It sounds too good to be true. More often than not, I want fairly long exposures to get rid of the ripples on the pool or to give the sea a misty appearance. Once the sun starts to come up, I do use HDR or more often exposure fusion. For noise control, lately I have started using Noiseware Professional which seems to do a good job without introducing artifacts. I might give PhotoAcute a look once they get a profile for the M.Zuiko 9-18mm lens. Cheers Peter
