What I love about shoot­ing dig­i­tal is the way you can manip­u­late shut­ters speeds with seascapes to get the per­fect water move­ment. I usu­ally use a com­bi­na­tion of full ND fil­ters, shut­ter speed and iso to achieve this and will only change the aper­ture as a last resort but not below f11. Now to do the same thing with your panoramic film cam­era is not so easy as firstly you have a fixed iso. The fuji GX617’s shut­ter speeds are in 1 stop incre­ments from 1/500 sec to bulb, leav­ing you only the aper­ture to play with which to can set to any aper­ture incre­ment you want from f5.6 to f45. I per­son­ally shoot all my land­scapes on f16 and higher with the GX617.

So on this morn­ing I wanted to put some more thought into my water move­ment other than just tak­ing the shot at the shut­ter speed F16 was going to give me. So to achieve a water move­ment of around 1 sec to get that beau­ti­ful detail in the water I had to work out what my cor­rect expo­sure was at say f16 and from there work back with the gear and options I had avail­able to get the shut­ter speed of 1 sec.

My base read­ing @ f16 was 1/60 of a sec. So even if I went to f45 I was only look­ing at 1/8 of a sec which isn’t enough. So my only other option was to screw on a 3 stop full ND fil­ter. Bring­ing my expo­sure to 1 sec @ f45.

From here I had now achieved my cor­rect expo­sure and it was a case of bal­anc­ing the light dif­fer­ence with my Lee Fil­ter sys­tem and using a 1 stop soft grad. Now I was set up and ready to go and cap­ture images as they formed in front of me, but keep­ing in mind that you have to pre­dict the water move­ment that’s going to hap­pen within that 1 sec expo­sure. At $5 a click just in film you don’t want to stuff too many up. When your film arrives back from the lab it is sim­ply a choice of which water looks the best.

Equip­ment : Fuji GX617 Panoramic cam­era with 90mm lens + Cen­ter fil­ter | Velvia 50 film | Hoya 3 stop full ND | Lee Fil­ter 2 stop soft grad. Image scanned on Ima­con 343 drum scanner.

Matt Lauder is the edi­tor of the Rub­bing Pix­els web­site and is a full time land­scape pho­tog­ra­pher based on the Cen­tral Coast of NSW. To view Matt’s full pro­file and the range of video he has con­tributed to the site please click here.