Great Falls

Sunset yesterday, Olmsted Island, C&O Canal National Historical Park, MD and Great Falls Park, VA. Looking out to Great Falls.

Nikon D90 with 18-105mm Nikkor @ 38mm, f/29, ISO100 for 1/2 sec. Hitech 0.9 HE and 0.9 SE GND filters, with HE facing up and SE facing down.

Actually, the conditions were just right for photographing the falls - but when I opened up my camera bag, I realized that I had no hi-density ND filters, and the ND8 that I got cheaply had ridiculous flare. Oh well, my only choice was to use a couple GNDs (now that I think about it, it's strange that I have GNDs and no normal NDs - not counting the crap plastic one......gotta fix that). So I used a .9HE and .9SE with the SE upside down, and another .6 SE to hold back the sky - I knew to expect some loss of quality, but it was my only option at that time. Big mistake. Suffice it to say that not only was the output horrible, the flare covered half of each frame. I quickly took off the .6 and got a different angle, but I still couldn't achieve a shutter speed longer than 1/6 second... I ended up overexposing by a couple stops in order to get a 1/2 second exposure and bringing the exposure back down using the RAWs...

Anyways, I'm definitely going back there once I get a couple decent NDs - it's an amazing place, not far from where I live, that I only found out about a few days ago.