The Dam
Sometimes, it’s easy to over-engineer an image concept.
The Carreg Coch Dam next to the Elan Valley Visitor Centre
Mistakes were made.
This happened to me recently when I attempted to photograph the Carreg Coch Dam in Mid Wales. Following on from my long exposure image of The Bridge, which you can read about here, I decided that this dam should be my next large-scale engineering image.
Carreg Coch Dam
Knowing there is a lot of water around at the moment, and when there’s a lot of water here, it flows over the top, cascading down the dam wall, I thought another long exposure shot would be just right. However, this is where I over-complicated things.
When you get an enormous amount of water flowing down the wall and being channelled into the river, the water actually creates a lot of airflow. Combine that with the regularly windy conditions that Wales experiences during the winter months and as you stand on the little footbridge spanning the river, you’re hit with a blustery gale in your face.
Bundled up against the elements.
But of course, it’s not just wind you’re hit with. Water droplets are carried in the airflow so you don’t stay dry for very long. With the right clothing, of course, it’s not an issue for us humans. But a camera on a tripod, taking a long exposure is a different matter. Not only is the camera being buffeted by the winds, but of course, the filter is being covered with tiny droplets of spray throughout the exposure. A sixty-second exposure is a long time for water to collect on the filter face and you can’t wipe it clean during an exposure of course.
Me pointlessly trying to keep my lens clean of water droplets.
Now, as it happens out of the 4 long exposures I took, I thought I’d got one stable, clean image, where the wind died down just long enough and the mist only hit a fraction of the glass. However, I was a fool. I was trying to be too clever. How could I have been so careless? The image wasn’t ‘clean’, there were visible water droplets on the final image. And it certainly wasn’t stable. Looking closely at the lower part of the frame, the image is ‘soft’, showing movement during the exposure.
Look at how much water was flowing down the wall and through the river. A lot. Did I really need a 60-second exposure to capture that much motion in a still image? No! Of course, I didn’t.
Problems solved.
And so I went back. I swapped the Lee Filters 10 stop filter for a Polar Pro ND 64, which cuts 6 stops of light from the lens. With this set up, I got a shutter speed of 8 seconds at f16.
That was a lot less time than the 60 seconds I originally tried, which meant I had way more opportunities for not having the camera moved by the buffeting winds and also more chance of having a clean lens throughout the shot.
So here’s the moral of the story. Don’t overcomplicate your images when you don’t need to. Trying to be clever for the sake of showing your knowledge sometimes backfires. I’m putting my hand up to this because there was no need to go that slow for the amount of water flowing through this shot.
Enjoy the image, and don’t be afraid to make mistakes yourself.
