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Thursday I drove to Omaha to pick up a few neutral density filters. 2 camera shops later and I'm on my way back home empty handed. So, I then overnight them from www.bhphotovideo.com. I got 3, 3 stop filters for a total of 9 stops of shutter lengthening. I added it up and figured during the day I could get 25 second shots at F18. This would make for some entertainment on high speed, high level cirrus days. I watched them one afternoon and really wished I could do it then. Well if I was thinking, I would have ordered 3, 4 stop filters so I'd not have to be down to the F18-F20 range to get a long enough shutter for this. Oh well I think it might be ok. I'm getting a lot of dots and am betting it is due to the small aperature. But it is also hard to keep stuff off all three filters. More testing is certainly needed. A day later after cleaning the filters and putting tape around them things seem to be ok in the small small aperature settings. Anyway I couldn't wait to test it out so I went out today. Today was about the worst possible day for this. Well almost. It was nothing but a thick sheild of mid-level clouds. I was on the southern edge of this and thought perhaps it'd open up and change a bit. Well this first shot is mid-way through the shooting and without the filters on. It got pretty cool looking as the southern edge where it broke up stayed like this. The problem was(a big problem) the flow was rather pathetic. The clouds were barely moving. So the below examples are more or less a worst case scenario(and have the initial dust spot problems at small aperatures).
Same scene with a 20 second exposure. Not very exciting at all. I am sure it will be alot more fun when there are wispy cirrus around with a 130knot upper jet. I checked the flow when I got home and I think 500mb was around 30 knots.
Same 20 seconds....some hope I guess. I can't wait for a better cloud day.
I think I got this one to 30 seconds at F20. It was even calm at the surface. I got one little push of the wind to move the blades. I clicked the shutter right when they started and they were done moving by the end of the 30 seconds. So nothing too crazy here. Just testing it out on a bad day. It loves to throw the camera off to a red color. That will need sorting out. The filters also need to be blocked from the sun. Any sunlight getting down the top makes a mess with any dust and whatnot on the glass. The tiny apertatures are not helping this either(I don't think). Problem seems to be solved a day later now. See below.

I got out to parent's house to see the dogs and noticed the halo around the sun. So back into town I went to get my camera. I should know by now to always have it with. The clouds quickly thickened up and this was gone. I'm glad I did not put it off like I had planned. It was only 1:30 or so and I figured that halo would be there for a while. I was wrong.
I cleaned off the filters and this time put tape around them to keep all light from coming in the edges. This worked much better. I also took the white balance off auto and used cloudy. I think with the long exposure the auto function would push it red to offset night blueish tendancies(long exposure it figures it is night out....I assume). I was having a bad problem with red the previous day and this seemed to correct that.
As you can see with really long exposures you can make some ghosty feelings to the images. I let half the shot or so be just the scene and then jump into it for the second half. That is all I did on these. T hese are not done with various layers in photoshop but simply with long exposures.
After a trip up the hill and chasing the dogs down TWICE I did not feel like going too far for any cool roads. This is part of the driveway and it is now starting to sprinkle. I had to step very slowly. The shutter was about 25 seconds and if I walked any further I'd barely show. Light was getting lower so I had no choice. I was certainly not untaping and making a new mess of my setup of cleaned filters for the sake of speeding up the shutter. Somewhere towards the end I just bumped the ISO up to 200 and lowered the Fstop back down(the foreground rocks paid the price).
Rocking on the porch.
Back to the road in the sprinkles. I took my hat off and set it on the camera. That seemed to take care of the water worries.
Again just long exposures. I stood still for half the shutter then do whatever for the other half. If the exposure is long enough it won't trail you unless you move really slow. I need either a high speed cirrus day or just a windy day. Both of these days there was really no surface winds to blow trees and leaves around and not much helping out in the sky either. Ideas are starting to roll in now though and I'm fairly excited to play around with this.