So recently I have been posting pictures that I have been taking through a piece of #12 Welding Glass on my Facebook and Flickr. You may be wondering what sort of effect would that have if you have never seen pictures through a very dense filter. What I am doing is replacing another filter called a Neutral Density Filter that allows you to leave your shutter open for extended periods of time while in bright light, this can create motion blur in your images.
Bridge in Snohomish WA shot around 11am with shutter open 322 seconds
Now it’s also not just as simple as hooking up a remote and locking the shutter open. You actually need to do a bit of color correcting to get the shots to look right. Most welding glass is tinted a green or purple giving your shots the tint of your glass.
This is the same image as above as it came off of my camera
Using Adobe Lightroom I am able to use the tint slider to adjust the color of the image giving it a more natural color.
I am no expert in this method of photography but I know that when I posted this image people were asking about so I thought I would give a bit of a walk through on how I put the filter together for less than $20.
#12 Welding Glass
I started off by ordering a very cheap wired remote from Amazon that was able to get the job done that I needed which was just opening and locking the shutter open. I was able to pick one up for just under $5 with free shipping. Then I also had to pick up the glass, which I honestly thought was going to be the most expensive part which definitely was not the case. I went to a local welding shop and asked for #12 welding glass which is one of the darker shades. I picked up the glass for only $6. You may notice in the picture above a small piece of tape, well you’d be correct I used electrical tape to attach a clear UV filter to one side of the glass.
Filter side
Now I did use a lot of tape, which is somewhat necessary. Since the shutter is going to be open for such a long time you don’t want any light leaking through the seal between the filter and the glass that can ruin your minutes long exposure. When putting the electrical tape on you want to be careful not to go too far over the edges of the filter as not to prevent the filter from screwing onto the lens once you have your shot set up.
So that is how I was able to replace a $90+ Neutral Density Filter with a $10 filter, $6 piece of welding glass and $5 remote.
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