This post (first pic) is also my submition for todays monomad skies challange
Few years ago I bought my first camera. Of course in the beginning I photographed everything: water pouring from the shower, bedside lamp etc. Few thousands pictures later I tried to make better shots. I remember, that on trip to Hungary with my fiancee and our best friends was my first vision of pic made during a day with blurry clouds.
I waited 2 days for windy day and nice looking clouds. I knew, that conditions are good enough, so I took my tripod, my kit-lens (Nikkor 18-105) with Marumi polar filter and walk to the Balaton Lake.
Polar filter can darken your exposition even for two stops, so that was the reason I took it with me. First shots and first fails...even with aperture set to f22 (which is not the best quality you could get from pictures) my shutter speed was too short, to make a blurry clouds (look below).
Allright, I thought that it has to be some other trick for that, because I have seen pictures like that and made during a daylight. So my second idea was: I will wait for the sunset...weaker light = longer shutter speed.
Few hours later, when almost during sunset I made another pictures.
It still wasn't something I wanted. Light was far from what I had in my mind and also wind was gone completely.
Pic above was made with 20s shutter speed and clouds did not move even a milimeter. That was the moment I gave up
ND Filters for the win
Some time later I learned about ND filters...something that can dramatically extend your shutter speed during daylight. It's some kind of darkening glass, like the one in welding mask. I thought about buying one, but these are not cheap (like for a piece of darkening glass...c'mon prices are sick), but always I had other things to buy. I prefferred to buy lenses rather than ND filter. Of course I tried to imitate that kind of filters with piece of welding glass (which is really cheap), and it is not a bad idea, but if you want to do the same, make sure that welding glass you want to buy has no tint color. Mine was green as hell. It's fine when if you accept monochrome pictures only. Don't think that you can change that tint in post with white balance...tint is too strong.
Two weeks ago I thought about blurry clouds again...and hey - I could afford buying ND filter but I was confused with diversity and strength. Finally I ended with testing few apps with ND strength calculators. The best for me was NiSi Filters. Thanks to that I made my decision to buy ND1000. Below are results of quick shooting. Wind was weak, but good enough to make a result on pictures. Hope to get better at that type of photography soon.
All photos used in this post are mine.