Rocks at Punggol Beach
(18 March. 2012, 2:34PM, Punggol, Singapore)

Rocks at Punggol Beach
(18 March. 2012, 2:37PM, Punggol, Singapore)

Punggol Beach, located at the northeastern part of Singapore is a national heritage site with a quite dim reminder of how cruel the war was. However, there’s no denying the fact that this is one of the few beaches in Singapore with such nice rock formations. It would have been really great if the beach is as clean as those at Sentosa but I feel that that is of a lesser concern compared to what I felt how ’oily’ the beach was. I was wondering how come the sand kept on accumulating under my slipper until I realized that I must have step on some oil slicks that gradually builds up on the shore. Not really a good sign what with this beach also a popular spot for fishing enthusiasts lining up at the nearby jetty.

Set-up
For night photography, it is normally required to take photograph using long exposure to allow more time for the light to come into the camera’s image  sensor to get a proper exposure. But for day time photography, long exposure would mean an over-exposed shot or a washed out image (where all you will see will be a white image depending on how much over-exposed the photo is) unless you provide a means of blocking or stopping the light that comes in. This is where the Hoya NDx400 Filter is used…”It actually limits the amount of light values by 9 stops to less than 1/500th of its original intensity…so it can also be used to achieve super slow shutter speeds in daylight to render moving subjects invisible”. For this photograph, the moving subject is actually the water but due to the slow shutter speed, it came out more like a mist and not like the strong waves that they actually are. If you had seen a welder’s glass/goggles before, you will have an idea how dark this filter is so the shot has to be composed first before placing the filter onto the lens. Once the neutral density (ND) filter is in place after the metering was done, I set the lens to manual focus to prevent it from re-focusing again. Use of tripod, as with any slow shutter speed shot, is a must.

Metering
So how long can the shutter speed be slowed down to get a proper exposure?

Two ways to go about it.

First is by trial and error. Set the camera to Manual mode and with the aperture (f22) and ISO speed (100) fixed, play around with the shutter speed. Slow it down (higher exposure value) if the image is too dark or speed it up (lower exposure value), if the image is too bright.

Second is by using a free iPhone apps . I downloaded this LongTime Exposure apps where it calculates the exposure time with the ND filter on. Using it is simple as you just need to match the type of ND filter used with the metered exposure time without the attached ND filter and the apps will provide you with the calculated exposure time with the ND filter on. And I can say that the values that I got so far are all spot on.

Post Processing
I do not have the option of using the Nik softwares plug-ins at the moment as my trial versions already expired and I can tell you that I really missed them . For these shots, I tried another way of post processing by bringing out the details using tonemapping at Photomatix and then combining the HDR processed shot with the original RAW file thru layers at Photoshop CS5. I did not use the Lightroom 3.6 here except for file management.

Another shot taken at the same place but with different post processing applied. Click here to view large.

Rocks on the Mist at Punggol Beach
(18 March. 2012, 1:56PM, Punggol, Singapore)