Digital burning aka who needs grads
 

Evening all

Here's a quick demo of that age old technique of burning. Now, instead of using a darkroom, I used my digital SLR and a Lee Filters pouch to hold back the sky.

In order to find the exposure for the ground, I took a spot meter reading from the tarmac and placed the tone where I wanted it.

Please note though, it's only for demo purposes to show what you can do with minimal kit.

[url]http://www.photoradar.com/photos/121289/jools-elliott/who-needs-grads[/url]

Any thoughts?

Jools

PS I did try inserting it as an image but couldn't it to work :s

Broken link.

I know. Try just clicking on the link. I couldn't get it to go in the image tags.

Scratch that. I found a way!

[IMG]http://www.photoradar.com/files/imagecache/original_large/photos/users/jools-elliott/mg-0213.jpg[/IMG]

So what have you done?

Well, ideally this type of scene would have needed a minimum of a 2 stop grad to hold back the sky in order to stop it burning out. In this though, I just used a filter pouch as a grad filter.

It's a bit of a hit and miss technique though.

What so held over the sky for have the exposure?

Yep. The filter pouch was placed over the sky during part of the exposure to hold it back. You can even do it with your hand!

how long was the exposure?

52 seconds in total. One shot only.

To do this technique you ideally need a minimum exposure of 30 seconds. It's from here you count back the number of stops needed to burn in the sky.

So, if the ground takes 30 seconds, allow roughly 2 - 4 seconds for a sunset/ sunrise.

It's quite nifty and well worth trying out :)