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This image won first place in the recent 3^rd Progress Print competition for Christine Oliphant who won the overall trophy, the Harvey Adams Cup.

"Brandlehow Jetty is on the shores of Lake Derwentwater, near Keswick.  It was taken in the evening just as the last of the light was hitting the far hillside.  The clouds were moving quite quickly, so I decided it might be the perfect opportunity to use the Lee Big Ten stopper to slow down the movement in the clouds and smooth out the choppy surface of the lake.   The Ten stopper is not an easy animal to tame but allows you to achieve some stunning effects with water and cloud movement.

My preferred routine is to decide on the aperture, I wanted everything including the far banks of the lake to be in focus so needed  good depth of field, so chose  f10 which is near what I consider to be the sweet spot of the sigma 10mm – 20mm wide angle lens( f8 – f10). Making a note of the shutter speed that f10 would give me, which happened to be 1/4s, I then added my ten stops making a shutter speed of 240 seconds. (Tripod and remote shutter release are essential for this type of photography!).

Putting the Nikon D300s into manual mode and dialling in my chosen aperture and my shutter speed ( ten stops included) all that was left to do was to check composition and  manually focus then slot the ten stop filter into position. It’s important to remember to focus first as once the filter is in position it is impossible to see through the filter. A stopwatch (on my iphone) allowed me to time the exposure. Using the ten stopper can be  tricky during a long exposure as light conditions are always changing, and in this instance it was getting darker so to be on the side of caution I added a few extra seconds to my calculated exposure and finally released the shutter after 246 seconds.

It is vital that during the exposure the viewfinder is covered, as it is surprising how the light entering the viewfinder can have a detrimental effect on the exposure causing the image to be over exposed.  The resulting image showed what I had hoped to achieve, some movement in the clouds and a super smooth lake surface. 

White balance is a problem with a ten stopper, as some ten stop filters produce a very heavy magenta cast whilst the Lee ten stop filter tends to be on the cool blue side. I chose to leave white balance set on auto on the camera and during post processing corrected that by using the white balance tool in Adobe Camera Raw clicking on an area that I thought was mid grey. Choosing an area of the image that is near to the colour of the back of your hand is also a good guide to colour correction.  This is usually enough to get rid of any blue cast the filter may have caused.  

Taken with a Nikon D300s, Sigma 10mm – 20mm wide angle lens, + Lee Big Ten Filter + Lee 0.6 hard grad filter + remote shutter release .Aperture f11 , shutter speed 246 seconds."

Chris Oliphant