The 5d3 with some Lee and loooooooooooong exposures

digitalfailure

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Brian
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Anyone out there shooting exposures of plus 5 minutes with the 5d mk3 and both the Lee big and little stoppers in place?

I recently stacked them both to get a 16 stop drop on a session at Penmon Point light house. The waves were crashing in on the rocks and using the two stoppers was the only way to get the super smooth look I wanted.

The images looked good on the rear LCD, but when I got them on to my mac I'm seeing a shed load of red noise speckles across the image which has shocked me a bit.

ISO was higher than I'd liked (400) due to the tide starting to turn and the waves getting rougher, I could have possibly dropped the Ap down from F22 to say F16 and reduced the ISO to compensate but thats by the by and totally academic now but I was wondering if anyone else had noticed the noise and how you dealt with it. I found my normal noise reduction methods didn't touch it :eek:

It might have been a issue brought on by the LEE filters which is no longer a problem for me due to a massive gust of wind toppling my tripod as I was opening my bag to pack up. The resulting impact exploded BOTH filters and has jolted my 24-70L's internals giving it a tight spot on the zoom ring at 35mm.

Can you imagine how gutted I was to see the noise issues on the back of a disastrous finally to a pleasant day which will cost around £600 for new filters and repairs to the lens. :bang:

I think the Lee's will be replaced with the new Hitech Firecrest filters now though as they don't give the colour cast.
 
No idea Johny,
I'd never tried such dramatic exposure times before on this body, but I'd not have expected that to be the cause as the sensor is supposedly great for video work which can run to 29.9 minutes and that wouldn't have such strong filtering.

I'd done long exposures with just the big stopper on my old 5d2 before and not noticed it, but as I've only recently got the mk3 and the little stopper i'd never run this combo.

The little stopper was only a fortnight old and I took it to Paris last week to do some stuff of around 1minute in order to remove people and smooth water at the sights and again those images look fine.
 
Just out of interest, was long exposure NR turned on or off?
 
pretty certain its in the default position of on but i'll check..... i'd forgotten all about that setting (y)
 
Huffy

it's not as regular as that, the noise patten is different sizes and across the entire frame, not just dark areas and it's there in the RAW before any tweaking.

Its either extreme noise build up from being behind 16 stops of diffusion or minute particles on the filter.....there was a large degree of crud flying around due to the wind and waves.
 
I would blame thermal noise probably.
I can't help but wonder why you wanted smooth water on a day with crashing waves. When the waves are crashing shoot them that way. When the sea is calmer shoot long exposures.
 
ALL camera sensors suffer from thermal noise, some more than others, and its perfectly normal for exposures as long as yours. Five minutes plus will give it some serious heat. Most software will map it out in post.
 
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The plan for the shoot was ethereal misty water around the rocks, weather was calm at home and listed as being a gentle breeze on met check when I set out for the 80 mile journey...... weather has a habit of changing though :D

I had no interest in capturing the speed of the waves although they were splashing up on the jagged rocks on the shore they didn't look spectacular enough around the lighthouse to be interesting....especially with a very bright blue sky.

Odd Jim......will Lr4 map it out? I haven't got around to installing Lr5 yet :)
 
I'm going to oppose the others here, Brian, and blame it on photon noise.

Typically the red channel will saturate ahead of the blue and finally the green. Using Lee's ND's (Stoppers) will given a pretty even reduction in light across the visible spectrum but the near infrared part is still there.....your sensor can capture 2-5% of the near infrared spectrum and that's why you can just about achieve IR shots using filters and long exposure times. I think that this small amount of near infrared (daylight) has filled your red buckets so to speak. A long exposure at night in would have very little near infrared light to cock things up in the same way.

Bob
 
That's closer to my original thinking Bob.

It's all across the image, not just in random pixel areas and it's totally random in shape with some "particles" being bigger than others.

As the Lee's got smashed I'm going to try the hi tech firecrest 16, it's supposed to be better at filtering out the Ir light than the Lee..
 
Anyone out there shooting exposures of plus 5 minutes with the 5d mk3 and both the Lee big and little stoppers in place?

I recently stacked them both to get a 16 stop drop on a session at Penmon Point light house. The waves were crashing in on the rocks and using the two stoppers was the only way to get the super smooth look I wanted.

The images looked good on the rear LCD, but when I got them on to my mac I'm seeing a shed load of red noise speckles across the image which has shocked me a bit.

ISO was higher than I'd liked (400) due to the tide starting to turn and the waves getting rougher, I could have possibly dropped the Ap down from F22 to say F16 and reduced the ISO to compensate but thats by the by and totally academic now but I was wondering if anyone else had noticed the noise and how you dealt with it. I found my normal noise reduction methods didn't touch it :eek:

It might have been a issue brought on by the LEE filters which is no longer a problem for me due to a massive gust of wind toppling my tripod as I was opening my bag to pack up. The resulting impact exploded BOTH filters and has jolted my 24-70L's internals giving it a tight spot on the zoom ring at 35mm.

Can you imagine how gutted I was to see the noise issues on the back of a disastrous finally to a pleasant day which will cost around £600 for new filters and repairs to the lens. :banghead:

I think the Lee's will be replaced with the new Hitech Firecrest filters now though as they don't give the colour cast.

1. around 2min should comfortably do the job of blurring water to nothing. 30s actually does OK job.
2. I completely fail to see your logic here. Raise ISO to 400 to stack up a filter on top? Really? Why?! Stick to 100 on tripod
3. F22 is best avoided. F16 is the last sensible click, or f/18 if you are that deperate
4. Strap on your neck! Really there are NO EXCUSES. I suppose this was a good enough lesson.
5. £218 per piece of glass? I thought lee were bonkers, but that takes the biscuit. Enjoy; hopefully they will have longer life allowance.
 
You can buy screw-in filters to cut out the IR that the hot mirror lets through but I suspect that the cost would be prohibitive for all but the most ardent exponents of long daylight exposures.

Bob
 
1. around 2min should comfortably do the job of blurring water to nothing. 30s actually does OK job.
2. I completely fail to see your logic here. Raise ISO to 400 to stack up a filter on top? Really? Why?! Stick to 100 on tripod
3. F22 is best avoided. F16 is the last sensible click, or f/18 if you are that deperate
4. Strap on your neck! Really there are NO EXCUSES. I suppose this was a good enough lesson.
5. £218 per piece of glass? I thought lee were bonkers, but that takes the biscuit. Enjoy; hopefully they will have longer life allowance.


1, 2 minutes wasn't anywhere close to smoothing out the transition between rocks and water. I was shooting from a rocky outcrop. And the swell was 2 to 3 feet.

2, raised ISO instead of opening aperture , already conceded that as a rookie long exposure mistake in an attempt to reduce shutter time and still record the white misty effect I wanted due to incoming tide :D

3, yup, hindsight and logic dictate that subject to camera distance being what it was and that the bright ambient light f16 would have given more than acceptable DoF and a slower shutter speed for the ISO selected. This is part of 2 and unlikely to happen again as I gain experience shooting over longer times.

4, tripod was moved to a flatter section while I grabbed my bag, as the wind hadn't given me any real concern while the camera was left alone exposing I didn't really give it enough thought, the wind force literally doubled. I can honestly say it took me by surprise, if it'd have been causing concern I'd have removed the camera from the tripod and carried it to the bag. The law of sod kicked my ass big time.....lesson well and truly learnt!

5, yes 99 quid each for a 100mm x 100mm piece of glass is bonkers, the hitech filters are the same cost though too.
 
ALL camera sensors suffer from thermal noise, some more than others, and its perfectly normal for exposures as long as yours. Five minutes plus will give it some serious heat. Most software will map it out in post.
Although I use LR4, I'm not sure! Canon's DPP will IIRC.
 
The images looked good on the rear LCD, but when I got them on to my mac I'm seeing a shed load of red noise speckles across the image which has shocked me a bit.

Thermal noise. Completely normal with very long exposures. use Long Exposure Noise reduction. It does make the exposure time twice as long though.

Timely post this, as everyone is panicking over their Nikon D810s having a "fault" that this thread demonstrates is utterly normal for digital cameras.

Either use long exposure NR and have the inconvenience of total exposure time being shutter speed x2, or retouch the spots out in post.
 
Anyone out there shooting exposures of plus 5 minutes with the 5d mk3 and both the Lee big and little stoppers in place?

I recently stacked them both to get a 16 stop drop on a session at Penmon Point light house. The waves were crashing in on the rocks and using the two stoppers was the only way to get the super smooth look I wanted.

The images looked good on the rear LCD, but when I got them on to my mac I'm seeing a shed load of red noise speckles across the image which has shocked me a bit.

ISO was higher than I'd liked (400) due to the tide starting to turn and the waves getting rougher, I could have possibly dropped the Ap down from F22 to say F16 and reduced the ISO to compensate but thats by the by and totally academic now but I was wondering if anyone else had noticed the noise and how you dealt with it. I found my normal noise reduction methods didn't touch it :eek:

It might have been a issue brought on by the LEE filters which is no longer a problem for me due to a massive gust of wind toppling my tripod as I was opening my bag to pack up. The resulting impact exploded BOTH filters and has jolted my 24-70L's internals giving it a tight spot on the zoom ring at 35mm.

Can you imagine how gutted I was to see the noise issues on the back of a disastrous finally to a pleasant day which will cost around £600 for new filters and repairs to the lens. :banghead:

I think the Lee's will be replaced with the new Hitech Firecrest filters now though as they don't give the colour cast.

I can't understand why you used ISO400 with a Big Stopper? No wonder you got a lot of noise. Read up on what causes noise.
 
Because I didn't have 32 minutes to do a single shot and still get the effect I wanted.

I've already stated that in hindsight I should have opened the aperture instead.
 
But upping the ISO would lengthen the time for a given (long) exposure, as would opening the aperture (for the desired effect).
 
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The plan for the shoot was ethereal misty water around the rocks, weather was calm at home and listed as being a gentle breeze on met check when I set out for the 80 mile journey...... weather has a habit of changing though :D

I had no interest in capturing the speed of the waves although they were splashing up on the jagged rocks on the shore they didn't look spectacular enough around the lighthouse to be interesting....especially with a very bright blue sky.

Odd Jim......will Lr4 map it out? I haven't got around to installing Lr5 yet :)

Brian

I had thermal noise on my recent long exposures and when I processed in LR4 it processed all of them out. (Interestingly, mine were all red ones too!)
 
But upping the ISO would lengthen the time for a given (long) exposure, as would opening the aperture (for the desired effect).

No it wouldn't. Higher ISO or wider aperture would shorten the time.
 
No it wouldn't. Higher ISO or wider aperture would shorten the time.


Yes indeed. But to get the effect he then wanted, he'd have to lengthen that exposure time, creating more sensor heat.

By increasing the ISO he's having to counter it with a longer shutter speed, if that makes sense. The OP is therefore creating heat, ISO and temperature noise for no reason.
 
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I was doing some 4 min exposures last week in the Lake District and was getting a few hot pixels on my 5DIII. Not seeing them in LR5.6 at a cursory look. Have you enabled ISO expansion to allow you to go down to ISO50? You'd have gained 3 stops extra exposure that way, giving you 13 stops (with just your big stopper) rather than the ISO400 and big + little stopper. Would have thought that would be enough. And if you've got a decent tripod, you could have done a multiple exposure (average) over 2 frames too if you wanted more smoothing.
 
Grr missed the later replies to this :(

Yes, ISO expansion is enabled and yes the settings used could have been chosen better by an experienced landscape photographer......I can still count the number of trips out to shoot long exposures on one hand :D

I'm thinking that the red noise was a combination of everything covered, stacking lee filters gives some anomalies from bouncing light in the Ir range and a strong overall cast. Add this to less than optimal camera settings and a desire to smooth out a fairly rough sea without getting washed away by an approaching tide and it's a lesson learnt.

Anyhow....I retried my hand using lower ISO and a new formatt hitech firecrest 16 on some long shutters and no red noise issues at all. This time I also took the camera off Auto noise reduction too and set it to on. I'm not totally sure the default setting of auto actually works. The manual says if long exposure noise reduction is on auto, it'll operate on shutters longer than 1 second. Well I was shooting up to 10 minutes and the image was instantly viewable on the LCD when the shutter closed. In the on setting the camera is locked for the same length of time as the exposure.

The firecrest filter is great, virtually no colour cast!!!!

I need more testing time with the firecrest, on my first frame I could see a strange circular artefact and on the second the scene was re composted and I had a soft area..... Very odd and so far a few people who've seen the image are at a loss to suggest a cause as the lens, camera and filter were all clean, the sun was at the rear right and the camera covered so no light leaks or reflections.

I couldn't recreate it when testing at home on the same settings as previously used.
 
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