Half Dome from Sentinal Bridge

Tech Info: Nikon D300s with Tokina 12-24 @24mm, f/16, ISO 200 for 15s.
Filters: B+W Polarizer and Hoya NDX400

Its been pretty busy at work and haven’t got much time to work on photos, but today after witnessing a superb match win by Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB) over Rajasthan Royals (RR) got some energy to work on a picture taken during the Yosemite trip.

Another very useful filter to have is a Polarizing Filter. This one helps to reduce the polarizing effect and can cut the reflections. This shot is an example where the filter is at its use. Usually when water is an element in your composition, the glare/reflection from the surface would be pretty high, thereby preventing the camera to see underneath the water. A polarizing filter will help in reducing those reflections and revealing details.

In this shot, I angled the filter just enough where the scene would contain some reflections and details on the river bed. To the bottom left, you see the river bed and as the polarizing effect is reduced, you can see the reflected light. Of course when you are trying to capture the reflection itself, you would avoid this filter. But here, I wanted both of them and hence the change in angle of the filter. The smoothness on the water surface was obtained by the use of NDX400 filter. As mentioned in the previous post, this one cuts the light and helps to get longer exposures during the day.

While taking this shot on the bridge, there was another guy with a medium format camera standing next to me. It was interesting to see the way he was composing; he took some test shots with a point and shoot and then used the medium format camera to compose the scene. I think its a great idea to go about composition this way, especially if you are having trouble visualizing the scene in a 4×5 format. Of course not necessarily with another camera, but even a small cardboard with a cutout in the middle should help. It’ll be interesting to try it out next time I’m out 🙂