3$ home made ND Filter

FIRST TRY:
http://www.danielepompei.com/photonew/locationpix/HMND_try_001.jpg
SECOND TRY:
www.danielepompei.com/photonew/locationpix/dsc_0100.jpg

www.danielepompei.com
daniele@danielepompei.com

Hello everyone, this is Daniele Pompei, an italian photographer from Rome.
I wanted to make this short video to share with you guys this foolish idea that came to my mind today, and in particular I wanted to share it with the guys from this web site called www.diyphotography.net because they always share cool, useful and cheap tips about photography.
How many times have we seen pictures like this? http://robcherry.deviantart.com/art/Boscombe-Pier-196646717
This image is absolutely stunning and this silky effect of the water is what makes this picture so wonderful.
So how do we get this effect on water? All you need to do is shooting long exposure pictures using a tripod and the moving water (and clouds) will look like this.
The main problem is with lights. When you have so long exposures, even on night time, you're gonna burn your pictures; lights will take over the whole thing, giving you just a crappy and too much over exposed picture. Most photographers will avoid this problem by using a neutral density filter applied on their lenses and this kind of filters will lower down the quantity of light being impressed on their pictures, even up to 9 or 10 stops. I guess this picture, in particular, was taken using a nd110 filter which is kind of expensive.. For example, a 67mm nd110 filter may cost more than 100 euros. Do we want to spend this money? I don't, because I'm not that much into landscape photography so I wouldn't use it that much.
So, now this is my foolish idea.
All we need is this cheap glass for welding masks I bought in a hardware store for a couple euros, some tape, some glue and a useless filter. In this case I used this UV filter I had and never used before.
What we are doing is gluing this filter on one side of the glass, applying some tape to be sure that light won't go through small flaws all around it and finally apply this filter on a lens.
It all takes no more than 5 minutes.
I'm gonna show you a crappy picture I've just made from my balcony.
Then I'm showing you what I just got using my home made filter in a two minutes long shot.
As you can see we will have some problems with colors but we can fix it all balancing the white or shooting in black and white.
I'm pretty much excited by this experiment and I really can't wait to go somewhere and test it in the next days or weeks. I promise I'll keep you posted about the results.
I hope you'll find this tip interesting and, in case you're gonna try and build this home made filter, I hope you'll keep me posted about your own results.
Last but not least, please visit my website www.danielepompei.com
Thanks, cheers!

Category:

Howto & Style

Tags:

• diy
• do
• it
• yourself
• home
• made
• nd
• filter
• glass
• welding
• mask
• italy
• rome
• italian
• photographer
• photography
• filters
• tip
• tips

[0Sskate]

Lol it is physically impossible to achieve an image like the rob cherry's without a strong nd grad like 0.9. Plus you should show a test shot that involves motion.

[OttoMarzo]

@0Sskate this is stronger than a 0.9, much stronger

[0Sskate]

@OttoMarzo No the example you showed can not be achieved with just welding glass. I've used both welding glass and a full hitech set up with grads. With welding glass you would need to take two exposures and properly blend them in ps

[OttoMarzo]

@0Sskate No way man, i've posted the test shot, and here in the description it's one more... nothing else than a welding glass

[0Sskate]

@OttoMarzo Ok. I know your test image was with the welding glass and I even made one because of this vid. All I'm really saying is that that seascape by rob cherry required a hard grad filter.

[OttoMarzo]

@0Sskate and I'm saying that I DO OWN the same filter Rob used and that the welding glass is much stronger! So stronger that you loose details! :)

[dipuislam]

Do you have more images to show that you took with your home made ND filter?

[SalihKiraci]

cool

[rolandconrads]

thanks

[OttoMarzo]

@xpressions1 you welcome :)