More Experiments with The Big Stopper.

I have been waiting for the tides to be right at Cleethorpes to experiment with my 10 stop ND filter for long exposure work.  I wanted high tide to coincide with sunrise which it did this morning, although there was no sunrise as such as there was 100% cloud cover. I was happy though to do black and white conversions and crop to square format to make the most of the conditions. Using the ND filter I was able to use 100 ISO and f16 and still obtain 240 sec exposures to smooth out the water.  The filter I use is a Hitech one and is fairly neutral with perhaps a slightly blue cast.

 I decided to leave this shot as a colour image.  I like the smoothness of the water and the pier behind the rides, but, to my mind, it lacks some impact.

 This image and the one below are of the tide coming in around this old groyne.  I decide to crop the colour shot, above, to 16:9 and also cooled it down slightly to enhance the blue feel of an early cloudy morning.

 For this, second, version, I cropped to square and converted the photograph to black and white.  I prefer this to the first version.

For these two shots of the pier with the remains of a groyne in the foreground I left one as colour and also did a black and white conversion.  I left both as 4:3 aspect ratio.  I quite like both, but again prefer the black and white.

 Again two versions of the same image with the black and white one cropped to 1:1 which I prefer.

 I didn't use the colour version of this shot as I didn't like it at all, but this is my favourite image of the set.  I really like the minimalist feel to it.  To enhance this I cloned out three small buoys that distracted the eye from the line leading along the groyne to the maker post.

 Again I didn't like the colour version of this at all so I cropped to square format and made a black and white conversion.

I like the way the 'Big Stopper' filter allows ultra-long exposures which removes any movement in the water to leave a silky smooth look.  In all the black and white conversions I used the radial filter in Lightroom 5 to produce a vignette effect.  I think that black and white and square format suits this style of image and am happy with these pictures.