Yes, this photo is a bit pedestrian, I will admit. I bought a neutral density filter while I was out in Portland at a camera shop early in the summer. It’s only a 2-stop, the densest they had. I probably need a few more to do some of the other tricks I’d like to pull of.
Basically, a neutral density filter makes everything darker. Why do you want to do this? So that you can capture the same amount of light with a slower shutter speed. Why would you want to do that? A variety of reasons, most of them involving motion blur and such. Water in particular looks somewhat crap at a higher shutter speed. You freeze the individual droplets and it just looks noisy. The lower you take the shutter speed, the more silky it gets. This is about half as silky as it could have been if I had taken it either earlier, or with with more filters.
All those ocean photos you see where the water looks like a low-hanging bank of fog? Those are long exposure shots, probably something like a 30 or 60 second exposure. This here is nowhere near that, but I don’t have an ocean to photograph so this is it. I like it anyway.
