At last I have my own filter kit for my D600 which consists of a set of Lee hard & soft ND grads, Lee Circular polarizer & the much praised Lee Big Stopper.

Obiviously I was extremely eager to try them out, so last Sunday after checking the forecast, we decided to test them out & give me my first proper experience with long exposures.

We we're up early, as we wanted to get over to Scalber Force in North Yorkshire before the sun rose to high; not what you want as the light just comes straight through and removes all shadows.

On the way to Scalber Force, we came across a lovely herd of highland coo’s which I had to stop & photograph; I do have a bit of an obsession with them.

Craig managed to drag me away from the "coo's", as we had to get over to Scalber force! We arrived at the location, and made our way down the steep bank and down to the falls... oh, how pretty they are too!!

A few of the Highland Cooo!

After finding a suitable spot and Craig talking to me about compositions, light and shadows; how the polariser works and of course which filter does what, we set of capturing a couple of test shots with Craig watching over my shoulder and of course giving me pointers in regards to how to work out the correct exposure based on which filters I was going to use.

I was left to my own devices & had some fun doing various timings, aperture & angles on the waterfall, making my way around various spots on the top part of the falls, using the Nikon 24-70 f/2.8 lens.

Craig then showed me how to use my Lee Big Stopper, with the Nikon 70-200 f/2.8 VRii with the idea of getting some abstract type images of the falls; This does take some workings out, as it removes ten stops of light and allows you to have exposures in the ten's of minutes, which if you exposue correctly will flatten all the water flow, clouds etc, but you have to be careful as you'll also get lots of blur in tree branches etc.

This is one of the photographs I managed to get using the lens/big stopper combo.

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