I actually want to share this “black card” quite some time ago .. but I always forget and not really able to get some good result to share … and while I am doing this , one of my gang actually notice me shaking my finger around the front len .. and she did ask what was I doing … 😀 and here you go ….

what is black card method and when will we use it ?

when we having different exposures, I normally do GND filter, exposures blending, black card, HDR …(we not going to discuss all here but share some sample)

A. GND filter

this is just like GND filter, most of the time we have big dynamic range/different between sky and foreground.. it normally have different from 2-9 stops …. e.g. for standard sunrise/sunset/magic hour environment, we face 2-4 stops different between foreground – sky… to resolve this we normally use GND to single frame picture have the correct exposure among foreground and sky e.g.

1. without GND

2. GND

– the sky is ~4 stops different from the foreground…

– I use GND.9s for above picture and do some PP trick to make the right exposure

B. HDR (seldom do this …but think we still good to know this)

– why I choose HDR … this was shoot use my SIGMA12-24mm which cannot fit any filter

– it was too cold to think which method to choose so I simply shoot 7 exposures back 😀

3. black card

– seldom use this as I am not really experience

– filter much easy

– need a lot of try and error but the good light could be disappear any time

– why I choose black card, the environment was dark, not sure how/where to apply GND

– multiple exposures will take double or even more times for single shot

– the exposure different >3 stops

for me I know the area that make me concern as below

– so what I did was, use my fingers block the over expose area

– allow only ~2-3 seconds exposure over 30 seconds exposure, so I block it until last few seconds and I remove my finger

so I get

most of the time we just need try and error, where some fail sample .. think only expose for ~1s

I will discuss more on other method in future … but let’s try and error on black card 😀