Long exposure image banding

Friday, 18 September, 2015

I quite often experiment with neutral density (ND) filters for long exposure photography as part of images I produce and, over the last couple of years, have had two particular problems (neither of which I have examples of any more so I’ve pulled in some links from Google Images):

1. Cross-banding: this occurs with many variable ND filters which comprise stacked circular and linear polarisers. When you rotate the outer ring you increase the density of the glass and so reduce the amount of light. However when you overcook the density then you can get this cross-banding. Easy to fix (reduce the effect!) and easy to work out where it comes from.


2. Linear Banding: this has occurred on and off on occasion and usually when I am shooting in sunlight. My initial reaction was that this was caused by leakage of light through the filter system itself (I use Lee Filters), however no amount of fiddling with that helped it. More by accident (and then some subsequent Googling) I covered the eyepiece on my Nikon D700 (in fact most Nikon DSLR have an eyepiece shutter) which instantly solved it. Clearly a small amount of light entering through the eyepiece and, even though the mirror was up, it was leaking on to the sensor. As David du Chemin notes, its a very strange (and irregular) phenomenon!

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