Whitewater Creek in Whitewater Canyon Wildlife Area, eastern Iowa
There is a chance that this could be my last winter photo of this season that includes snow. What it’s left on the ground melts rapidly away right now and warmer temperatures are in the forecast for the next days. After we left the cave with ice formations ,you perhaps saw in my last blog post, we went down to Whitewater Creek at the bottom of the canyon. When I saw the pristine field of snow along the creek, with no animal or human tracks on it, I felt the urge to make a photo.
The crystal-clear water flows slowly but still had a few ripples on the surface. Long exposure and the BREAKTHROUGH X4 10-stop neutral density filter eliminated any glare on the surface, made even the bottom of the creek visible, and still retained the reflections from the other side of the creek. It was magical and I love the outcome with any of my Breakthrough filters. By the way, to calculate the exposure time for a photo with the 10-stop or 6-stop ND filters, I use an app on my phone, called ND Timer. It’s free and does the trick just fine. After a test shot without filter you dial the normal exposure time (for this picture it was 1/80s) into the app, choose the grade of your filter (10-stops), and the app displays the required exposure time. I use it usually as a starting point and make corrections up or down to find the best results for the image I have in mind, especially with fast flowing water.
Nikon Z6II, Nikkor Z 24-70, f/4 S, Breakthrough X4 ND filter (10-stop) GITZO tripod GT2931 Basalt, KIRK BH-3 ball head @ 37mm, 15s, f/20, ISO 100