Waterfall stacking: Can you leave your tripod and ND filter at home?

Started 4 months ago | Discussion thread
Anders W
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Re: Waterfall stacking: Can you leave your tripod and ND filter at home?
In reply to Detail Man, 4 months ago

Detail Man wrote:

Anders W wrote:

What can you do to give the illusion of flowing water (or other similar motion) if you encounter a waterfall in broad daylight but left your ND filter and tripod at home? Or what can you do if the scene calls out for a UWA like the 7-14 or the Samyang/Rokinon 7.5/3.5 fisheye, neither of which takes filters (without a special holder) in the first place?

Inspired by discussions in this thread about the pros and cons of MFT WAs and in this thread about stacking I proposed a solution where you shoot a burst at a shutter speed that you can manage without the help of an ND and tripod and then merge and align the images in PP.

Does it work? And if so how well? I had to find out so went out in the beautiful (but cold, brrr) winter weather we had today to find about the only place in town with freely running water: the mighty "Iceland Falls" (Islandsfallet) of Uppsala.

First, I mounted my 14-45 on the E-M5 and shot the scene at ordinary "freezing" speed (f/5.1, 1/640 s).

Next, I stopped down as much as I could without going beyond the point (f/8) where diffraction starts to become a problem, lowered the shutter speed to 1/250, AFd and then switched to MF, set the camera to high-speed burst mode (9 fps) and fired until the buffer was full. This yielded 16 shots that were subsequently merged and aligned, with the fringe benefit of increasing DR by two EV.

Finally, I mounted the camera on a tripod, put on my home-grown variable ND filter (a linear polarizer on top of a circular one) and adjusted it until I got the shutter speed down to one second (which was close to, but not beyond, the point at which it starts to generate an undesirable blueish tint). But you do see, as expected, the polarizer effect in the sky.

Well, what do you think? I have some ideas myself but I like to hear yours first.

I would sure like to see your images at (at least) 1200 pixel-height. The new viewing-interface would allow even larger pixel-heights to be viewable. Having viewed these images at "native" size as well as at odd-numbered enlargement multipliers, I think that the sampled one looks noisier (to my eyes) for more reasons than being the combination of exposures sampling only 0.4% of the total recording time.

I'll see what I can do about that DM. Still have to make up my mind about how to display images here. As you know, I have so far preferred to link them in rather than employ the DPR gallery. And the free solution I currently use limits me to 1024x768. Would some crops do for the time being? If so what parts of the water would you suggest.

The concept of random noise cancellation depends on the scaling of the random noise being uniform within the averaged samples. Under that condition, reduction by the square-root of N is the best case (where a 2-stop factor of 4 SNR improvement would be the goal of averaging 16 exposures).

The dominant (image-sensor based) random noise present is Photon Shot Noise (as opposed to Read Noise) - which varies as a function of the illumination of the individual photo-sites. When sampling only 0.4% of the "action", the illumination of the individual photo-sites will be essentially random in nature - and with a magnitude that clearly exceeds the Photon Shot Noise itself.

Those two individual random components will combine vectorally (as the square-root of the sum of their squares), but the larger magnitude component will dominate (due to the effects of squaring). Thus, I don't think that this sampling concept is sound for subject-matter with non-stationary luminance (such as any moving subject-matter that varies in the scene lighting that it reflects).

Not sure I follow you here. For anything static, merging 16 images does yield a DR improvement of two EV. For anything dynamic, it yields the same improvement relative to the average true light level of the particular moments caught. In the stacked image, those moments are discrete over a two-second interval. In the low shutter-speed image, they are continuous over a one-second interval. That's why the former looks "foamy" and the latter "milky".

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