Long Exposures At Evening/Dusk/Night; Should I Get a Lee Little Stopper?

[JoeKitchen]

I am going to Havana in about 6 days and I got a room with a nice balcony that overlooks the Malecon and el Morro with no other buildings in the way.  I plan on capturing a few long exposure of the view and would like to do one at night. 

For those of you who have used the IQ260, what is the max length of an exposure before noise really becomes an issue?  (My goal is to capture one around an hour, give or take 15 minutes.) 

Assuming I will be using a 2-stop hard grad to shade the bottom of the frame (ground & artificial lights), working at ISO 140 (but over-exposing by a half stop), do you think the Lee Big and Super Stoppers, which I have, are too dense? 

Should I get a Little Stopper as well? 

[cgarnerhome]

I have done long exposures with the 260 but nothing longer than 10 minutes.  In that case, noise was not a problem but generally most of my work with long exposures was not in hot weather.  I always carry the little stopper with me since I often shoot well after sunset.  You can do the math yourself but an exposure of 15s without any ND will translate into a 16min exposure with a 6 stopper.  Again, I'm typically not shooting longer than 10 minutes.  I'm sure this is not much help and you probably know all this already.  Additionally, you wouldn't need the super stopper if you brought a 10stopper and a 6 stopper with you.  Sorry i can't be more helpful.

[voidshatter]

Given that your post count is not low, I assume this is not a troll thread, so I would reply with my honest experience with somewhat harsh words. I am not here to start another war, so please ignore this post if anyone feels uncomfortable reading.

As for your specific purpose of one hour long exposure, the IQ260 is not the right tool for the job. If you ever compare it against a Nikon D810 for this type of shots, you would find that the end result from the IQ260 can be regarded as junk.

First of all, the IQ260 has corner issues when you do exposure longer than 15 minutes. Noise would gradually build up in the four corners, making it essentially a crop sensor. This is also true for the IQ3 80MP.

Secondly, the IQ260 is susceptible to tiling issues for long exposures. This is also true for all fullframe CCDs.

Thirdly, the IQ260 is a CCD and its long exposure relies on darkframe noise reduction, which means for each light frame you shoot, you are forced to wait for a countdown of noise reduction of the same length. For example, you expose for 10 minutes, then you are forced to wait for another 10 minutes for the noise reduction, which may drive you mad as you see the light condition changes and you are not sure whether to give up the previous shot to make a new shot. This is unacceptable for sunset/sunrise as the light condition changes so fast that such limitation has a significant impact on your success chance.

Lastly, the native base ISO of IQ260 in long exposure mode is ISO 200 while ISO 140 is just an extended ISO. This causes the sensor to be very noisy when compared against Sony's CMOS sensors. Don't even think about bracketing - the darkframe noise NR would prevent you from bracketing with filters, and if you ever take off the ND filter to expose for foreground then you run into alignment issues. There used to be a fun thread.

If you really want to achieve good results for your long exposure of sunset/sunrise, I would strongly suggest you get a Sony CMOS sensor to do the job, e.g. Nikon D810/D800E, Sony A7R (not A7R-II though), Phase One IQ250 etc. Note that the Phase One IQ3 100MP has red shadow cast issues for exposures longer than 5 minutes. Doug claims that the issue has been addressed by a firmware update while my friend confirmed the opposite, so you might want to use your own judgement on that.

As for the filters, it's definitely recommended that you have one little stopper, one big stopper and one super stopper with you at the same time, to have the flexibility to decide which one to use after you take a test shot without any ND filter for the calculations. During daytime, a super stopper would be needed for 10min+ long exposures, and during nighttime even a little stopper may be too strong for 10min- long exposures.

Good luck with your shot!

[Tony Jay]

...
If you really want to achieve good results for your long exposure of sunset/sunrise, I would strongly suggest you get a Sony CMOS sensor to do the job, e.g. Nikon D810/D800E, Sony A7R (not A7R-II though), Phase One IQ250 etc...

Happened on this post.
I understand the differences between CMOS and CCD sensors with regard to long exposures and agree with the assessment.

I also know that the sensors in the A7R and A7R mark II are different but confess that I had no idea that the mark II was not suitable for the kind of long exposure shooting that is under discussion.
I own both bodies and so could use either for long exposure work.
To this point in time I can only recall doing exposures up to about 30s with either body with no issue.

I would be grateful for an explanation of why the mark II version is unsuitable for long exposure shooting.

Thanks

Tony Jay

[JoeKitchen]

Thanks for the input Yunli.

I do realize that CCD is at a disadvantage to CMOS for long exposures.  From your experience, would you say that 15 minutes is the hard limit? 

Also, I have had good results with over exposing by one stop in long exposure mode and pulling the image down a stop in post.  I get rather nice results, but these are limited to a couple of minutes.  Do things change drastically beyond 10/15 minutes? 

(My decision to upgrade to the IQ260 did not have anything to do with long exposures, but rather lens cast performance, which I absolutely need.  The IQ3 100 is very poor here.) 

[voidshatter]

Happened on this post.
I understand the differences between CMOS and CCD sensors with regard to long exposures and agree with the assessment.

I also know that the sensors in the A7R and A7R mark II are different but confess that I had no idea that the mark II was not suitable for the kind of long exposure shooting that is under discussion.
I own both bodies and so could use either for long exposure work.
To this point in time I can only recall doing exposures up to about 30s with either body with no issue.

I would be grateful for an explanation of why the mark II version is unsuitable for long exposure shooting.

Thanks

Tony Jay

When the A7R-II was initially released, it was found that the heat dissipation was not quite up to the task, building up noise over time. This thread probably explains it best. However keep in mind that all those tests were done with early firmware, so you might want to test it again with the latest firmware, given that you have access to both cameras (A7R and A7R-II). It would be interesting to see new results!

[voidshatter]

Thanks for the input Yunli.

I do realize that CCD is at a disadvantage to CMOS for long exposures.  From your experience, would you say that 15 minutes is the hard limit? 

Also, I have had good results with over exposing by one stop in long exposure mode and pulling the image down a stop in post.  I get rather nice results, but these are limited to a couple of minutes.  Do things change drastically beyond 10/15 minutes? 

(My decision to upgrade to the IQ260 did not have anything to do with long exposures, but rather lens cast performance, which I absolutely need.  The IQ3 100 is very poor here.)

I think it also depends on temperature. When I took my pictures with the IQ260 in the UK at around 10 °C / 50 °F, indeed 60 seconds at ISO 50 (ignoring the warning of long exposure mode) gave me better results than 20 seconds at ISO 140 in long exposure mode. The long exposure mode only seems to be useful for shots between 60 seconds and 3 minutes. Longer than 3 minutes, I generally find it to be excessively noisy.

Another thing is that I'm not sure what you will be shooting for one hour. Generally the sky and the water would be completely smoothed out without any texture if you shoot for one hour, making the picture look dull and boring, unless the cloud is moving extremely slowly. I found it to be interesting to shoot the sun trail for a single exposure of 2-3 hours (example 1, example 2), though these were shot with a Sony CMOS sensor inside a Nikon D800E/D810 (the smaller cousin of the IQ3 100MP and the IQ250), with much better dynamic range than that of the CCD digital backs. The IQ250 can do a single exposure of sun trail for up to one hour, but gets excessively noisy for longer than one hour. The IQ3 100MP had the red shadow cast issue and could only do up to 2 minutes of clean work (and now you might have to test it with the latest firmware to see whether it's been addressed).

There are better techniques to do long exposure with much better image quality (best signal-to-noise ratio), such as stacking (I explained details here). Unfortunately such technique cannot be easily applied with the CCD digital backs because of CCD's compulsory darkframe noise reduction, leaving significant gaps between each light frame.

As for lens cast, have you tried to shoot the IQ3 100MP and compare it against the IQ260 side by side for a case-and-control comparison? I found the lens cast of the IQ3 100MP to be acceptable, but you might find it more comfortable to sit with the IQ260 instead.

[Tony Jay]

When the A7R-II was initially released, it was found that the heat dissipation was not quite up to the task, building up noise over time. This thread probably explains it best. However keep in mind that all those tests were done with early firmware, so you might want to test it again with the latest firmware, given that you have access to both cameras (A7R and A7R-II). It would be interesting to see new results!

OK great, got the basis for the issue now.
I might look at the bulletins that have come with firmware updates from Sony and see whether they say anything.
I will do some shooting later this week and see what happens.

Thanks for the info

Tony Jay