What to do when things go BAD!
Have you ever had some weird object appear on your image when you’re doing landscape photography – especially long exposure landscape photography which involves very slow shutter speeds? This happened to me recently, What the ….?
Checkout this video.
Highlights of this video:
0:39 – What causes unwanted exposure
0:55 – How to prevent light leakage
Eliminating Light Leakage
Sometimes when you’re shooting landscape photography, you will experience this weird phenomenon. At the correct angle the suns rays will get between your filters and illuminate the dust specks on the 10 stop ND filter and cause these spots! It’s called light bleeding. SUCKS!!!
Here’s the fix…
Do this:
- Shade the filter with your hand or cloth
- Shade the eyepiece with your hand too – (stops light leakage into the sensor)
- Turn you camera at a different angle
Yes, it is also possible to get light leakage through the eyepiece and straight into the sensor. So, when you put your hand over the filter and the eyepiece, you are preventing any unwanted light from bleeding through. I learned this from Varina Patel (she rocks!).
Below are the images I took with my hand over the filter and the eyepiece.
Much better hey?
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Have you ever experienced light-bleeding? Please Leave your comments below.
Cheers,Brent
I learned that the hard way – similar end result to yours and I worked out that I could even see the brand name of my filter being reflected into the exposure!!!
A better bet, for the eyepiece at least, is to keep a bit of duct tape stuck to your camera somewhere (I keep it on the reverse of my rotatable screen) and stick it across the eyepiece. A longer term solution is to create a shroud for your camera and lens from light proof cloth.
But hands work when you have nothing else 🙂
Great suggestions Stuart. I’ve seen duct tape used by long exposure photographers before – they use the live-view function to compose the image, so never actually look through the eye piece. B
I took a class from a landscape photographer that was a fanatic about light leakage in which he covered the eyepiece and even at night he put a piece of black tape over the little red light on the back of his camera (Canon 5DIII) but he didn’t cover his ND filters. Great tip I will keep this in mind.
Only at the perfect angle do you get that problem – that is why it took my a minute or two before I figured out what was happening. B
Hi Brent – that’s a useful tip. Being from the old school era and shooting with medium format film cameras at the start of my photography career I learnt to use a matt box (I still use the same box today) to stop light leaking through the filter.
Covering the view finder was drummed into us back then. These days modern professional DSLR cameras have a lever near the view finder that drops a cover over the viewfinder window to stop light leaking in. The problem of light leaking through the view finder is completely eliminated (if the camera owner knows about it or remembers to use it).
Wonderful tutorial still.
Yeah – my canon 1D had that switch, to cover the eye-piece, but my 5D III does not have it. B
Thanks Brett,
That was so interesting; such a simple action and what a difference !
Thanks Brett,
That was a great tip. so very simple. thanks for sharing
My pleassure. B
Thanks Brent, I have never done that and I have gotten strange lights in my images. I love your tips, classes and emails. Thank You
Liz
Glad you like it – Brent