95
Photography News Issue 30 absolutephoto.com
First tests
Lee Filters Super Stopper from£70.45
Specs
Price £103.82 100mm, £70.45 Seven5, £132 SW150 Filter type Extreme long exposure solid ND Filter factor 32,000x, 15 EV Optical density 4.5 Colour temperature In this test, 6670K Construction Optical glass, 2mm thickness In the box Exposure guide Contact leefilters.com The Lee Filters Super Stopper is being launched at The Photography Show at the NEC, 19 March. Visit the Lee Filters stand for more information
No filter, AWB
Super Stopper, 10,000K
Super Stopper, 6670K
Four-minute long exposure
Super Stopper, AWB
Super Stopper, 8830K
Super Stopper, 5560K
Above A four-minute exposure taken using the Lee Filters Super Stopper, and various white- balance settings used with it.
Youcan’tcredit(blame!)aphotographic style to one accessory, but there is no doubt that when Lee Filters christened its 10EV, 1000x neutral- density filter the Big Stopper, it gave extreme long-exposure photography a memorable sobriquet. It’s the Hoover of photographic ND filters! The Big Stopper has been followed by the Little Stopper, a 6EV ND filter more suited to use in lower lighting levels, and now we have the Super Stopper, a 15EV ND filter that is available in Lee’s Seven5, 100mm and 150mm filter ranges. The Super Stopper is not just about making long exposures even longer, although some people will do that with it, but it’s more about being able to shoot very long exposures in good light or using wider apertures. In bright sunlight, at ISO 100 and f/22, using a Big Stopper might only let you shoot at 8secs or 15secs.With some fiddling around like adding another ND, a polariser or setting ISO 50 if you have it, you may eke out a longer
exposure. You could even combine the Big and Little Stoppers and you have a 16EV ND but using two filters has possible quality implications. The simple solution is the Super Stopper. A single filter fix that means a daylight meter reading of 1/125sec at f/11 that is eight seconds with the Big Stopper becomes four minutes with the Super Stopper. Perfect for slow-moving clouds and gently ebbing water on a bright day. I started my test by seeing if the Super Stopper was accurately delivering 15EV of light absorption. Lee does state that there can be batch differences and the filter factor can sometimes vary. The procedure was simple enough. A light reading of the scene was taken and a picture was made. Then an exposurewith the filterwas calculated, before adding the filter to a tripod- mounted camera, closing the eyepiece blind and taking the shot. If anything I thought my sample could be slightly denser but only marginally, so I was
going to stick with the 15EV filter factor for now. Next I did a white-balance test. The Big Stopper is blue with AWB and Lee suggests a manual 10,000K white-balance setting to offset this – I appreciate many users do the adjustment inRawprocessing. Lee also says this is changing and newer filters might need a lower Kelvin setting. With the Super Stopper, I started with AWB and then shot at settings on my Nikon D800 from 10,000K down to 5560K. It was a sunny day and I thought a manual Kelvin setting of 7140K looked best, as far as I could tell with me and the camera shielded from the sun under a travel towel. I was pretty close. Back home later, I saw that the 7140K image was slightly over-warm, but not unattractively so, and I reckon 6670K would be the setting I’d use in the future for accurate in-camera shots. With white-balance and filter factor tested I was ready to shoot some extreme long exposures. My non-
filtered scene was exposed for 1/125sec at f/11 and ISO 100 so that translates to eight seconds at f/11 with the Big Stopper, and four minutes at f/11 and ISO 100. The result is shown above. As mentioned earlier, a key benefit of the Super Stopper is that you can get away from the need to set small lens apertures and still enjoy long exposures. So while a 10EV ND might need f/22 to get a decently long exposure, the Super Stopper means you can shoot at f/4 so you have more control over depth-of-field. Of course, avoiding the minimum apertures means you make the most of your expensive lens – f/16 and f/22 even in top lenses means diffraction and less sharp images. Yet another benefit of this is that shooting at wide apertures means less depth-of-focus (sharpness behind the lens) so all that grot on your sensor that is so evident at f/22 is rendered less obtrusive at wider values. That could save a great deal of time with the clone tool. WC
Verdict
I am a fan of long exposures and enjoy shooting them, and now I have a one-filter solution to making them in bright light and I have more aperture options, too. That makes me very happy, and I think that the addition of the Super Stopper to Lee’s range is very, very welcome so it comes highly recommended. Pros Very long exposures on bright days made easy, filter factor means you can shoot long exposures at mid-apertures Cons Extra care needed shielding the camera in bright light
Powered by FlippingBook