Trying out the LEE Little Stopper
09th December 2020
Last weekend I visited Rye in East Sussex on the south coast, as I wanted to properly try out the birthday present I received in October - the LEE Little Stopper filter. For anyone that is unfamiliar with the use of physical filters, they are commonplace in landscape photography and typically include a circular polariser and graduated neutral density filters (I feel a separate blog post coming on!). I’ve been using filters since very early on into my photography when I was using a basic compact camera 15 years ago, so their concept to me is second nature, but this is a completely new filter to me that I had been keen to try for some time.
The LEE Little Stopper is a uniform neutral density filter (essentially a darkened piece of glass) that can sit in front of the lens to limit the amount of light entering the camera. This means that you can do longer exposures in brighter light without the risk that the image will be over-exposed. Doing long exposures isn’t so much of a problem with night photography given the low level of light already, but using the Little Stopper allows for longer exposures in the daytime and particularly when you may wish to capture motion. I’ve seen the Little Stopper typically used for seascapes, where the motion in the sea and clouds is relatively slow, so a 30+ second exposure will give the effect of smoothing the water and blurring the clouds and can create something quite ethereal. By way of a contrasting example, you would be less likely to need the Little Stopper for waterfalls because the water is often fast-moving and the motion can usually be captured with a shutter speed lasting just a few seconds; in this case to control the exposure, you could go down a few stops manually in-camera, use a polarising filter which itself should be sufficient to reduce the light entering the camera (and you’ll want to use one anyway to cut out any glare from the water surface), and if there’s a tree canopy, the light level may already be low.
So here is an example using a couple of shots from last weekend.
The above images were taken within a matter of minutes of each other; the top one is without the Little Stopper, whereas the bottom one is with it - note that both images were taken using a circular polariser and 0.9 soft neutral density graduated filter. I have included the exif data below each image for anyone interested. These images demonstrate how the 30 second exposure using the Little Stopper has allowed the lower and faster-moving dark grey clouds to become blurred as they travelled across the scene whilst the shutter was open, rather than freezing the clouds in time as shown by the top image.
As landscape photography is typically considered an art form and completely subjective to the viewer, you may prefer one image more than the other, and whichever one is fine! However, I must admit it’s going to be so nice getting to use the Little Stopper in future to achieve some different effects in my photography, so look out for some more of these types of images arriving into my portfolio!
As always, if you have found this blog post interesting and/or have any queries, please feel free to send a message via this site or on social media.
The LEE Little Stopper is a uniform neutral density filter (essentially a darkened piece of glass) that can sit in front of the lens to limit the amount of light entering the camera. This means that you can do longer exposures in brighter light without the risk that the image will be over-exposed. Doing long exposures isn’t so much of a problem with night photography given the low level of light already, but using the Little Stopper allows for longer exposures in the daytime and particularly when you may wish to capture motion. I’ve seen the Little Stopper typically used for seascapes, where the motion in the sea and clouds is relatively slow, so a 30+ second exposure will give the effect of smoothing the water and blurring the clouds and can create something quite ethereal. By way of a contrasting example, you would be less likely to need the Little Stopper for waterfalls because the water is often fast-moving and the motion can usually be captured with a shutter speed lasting just a few seconds; in this case to control the exposure, you could go down a few stops manually in-camera, use a polarising filter which itself should be sufficient to reduce the light entering the camera (and you’ll want to use one anyway to cut out any glare from the water surface), and if there’s a tree canopy, the light level may already be low.
So here is an example using a couple of shots from last weekend.
0.3 seconds, f16, iso 100, focal length 17mm
30 seconds, f14, iso 100, focal length 17mm
The above images were taken within a matter of minutes of each other; the top one is without the Little Stopper, whereas the bottom one is with it - note that both images were taken using a circular polariser and 0.9 soft neutral density graduated filter. I have included the exif data below each image for anyone interested. These images demonstrate how the 30 second exposure using the Little Stopper has allowed the lower and faster-moving dark grey clouds to become blurred as they travelled across the scene whilst the shutter was open, rather than freezing the clouds in time as shown by the top image.
As landscape photography is typically considered an art form and completely subjective to the viewer, you may prefer one image more than the other, and whichever one is fine! However, I must admit it’s going to be so nice getting to use the Little Stopper in future to achieve some different effects in my photography, so look out for some more of these types of images arriving into my portfolio!
As always, if you have found this blog post interesting and/or have any queries, please feel free to send a message via this site or on social media.