ND Filter help

T

thesmileyone

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Name
John
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Hi I need an ND filter for my 67mm thread lens. (Nikon 18-70).

I want to get a shot of a power windmill rotating and in the same shot, tall grass / corn being blown by the wind, but my shot needs to be conceptual so I am trying to get it to look like the windmill blades are blowing the corn.

It will be in the middle of a sunny day, so i am unsure on what strength ND filter I need ?

I have the choice of

The B+W Neutral Density+6 F-PRO Digital Filter reduces the light by six f-stops. With this filter and without changing the f-stop, a shutter speed of 1/60 s is changed to a full second
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The B+W 67mm 3.0/1000x (110) Neutral Density Filter has a light intensity reduction of ten f-stops, meaning that a 1/60 second exposure becomes a 15 second exposure
Click to expand...

The B+W 67mm 0.9/8x (103) Neutral Density Filter reduces the light intensity by three f-stops (log density 0.9) but still features very good colour neutrality
Click to expand...

I can only afford one. Have a sturdy tripod and ball head.

Or do i buy a filter holder and then a load of filters, problem being i hear they are difficult to use ?

I need to purchase this tommorow so any quick help would be appreciated!!!

Thankyou.
 
Leaving the filter bit for a moment I think the biggest problem here is if you have a really long exposure the blades on the windmill will vanish totally, it'll just look like they haven't fitted them. I'd go for a short-ish exposure to blur the blades maybe a 1/15th or something (have to experiment a bit) and maybe combin that with a longer exposure of the grass blowing. As for the filter, I'd probably go with the 10 stop personally.
 
thesmileyone said:
Am I right in guessing that if i buy the strongest (10 stop) i can "turn it into" as 3 stop etc by highering my ISO and shooting for less exposure time ?

Thanks for the speedy reply :)
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I wouldnt want to use a 10 stop in that way. Youre going to have to use an extremely high ISO to make a 7 stop difference (100 to 12800), which is going to make for a noisy shot - not what you want in a landscape
 
I would agree with the above - the 10 stop is going to be too much for what you want. I took a 15 second exposure of the M5 motorway recently at a busy time of day and theres not a single car in the shot! You want to blur the motion, not get rid of it all together. For this type of shot I would say use the 3 stop at most.
Although I would say the 10 stop is a fantastic filter which is usually stuck on the front of my lens (usually giving me exposure times of 2 minutes or so)

Also I wouldnt bump up the iso to compensate - as J.D. said you will get a whole load of noise
 
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