Had a few minutes to test drive the new frame averaging feature. to me the idea of no ND filters even in bright sunlight had a lot of appeal, but after working with it and now understanding it better, I can see the ND filters will remain in the bag.
I found that if I did a somewhat long capture, simulating a minute, even if the shutter speed didn’t provide continuous exposure but instead was a “gap” shutter speed, I
might be able to get away with it. I think the longer the time (in minutes), the more likely this will work. Below is a 1/15th of a second shutter speed simulating a one minute exposure.
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Using 1/6th of a second simulating a 2 second exposure left me with magenta discolored highlights. So here ND’s would have been much preferred.
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Similarly I tried a 30 second simulation at 1/30th of second shutter speed toward the sun, and had major magenta artifacts.
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I must have misunderstood exactly what was going on (or I just didn’t think it through), but there are some major limitations based on the electronic shutter “scan” time or whatever it’s called.
You have to get to 0.5 seconds to have what is called “continuous” exposure. This means that if you simulate 30 seconds with a .5 second exposure time, you will get 60 frames averaged together with no gaps, and the results will most likely be nearly identical to using an ND.
but once you go faster than .5 seconds, you will get 68 frames averaged, no matter what the shutter speed. So 30 seconds at 1/30th of a second doesn’t average 900 frames. whether its 1/10th or 1/500th, you will get 68 frames averaged.
My hope was the ability to simulate 2 second by averaging 30 1/15th of a second exposures, things like that. I really didn’t think it through because I just sort of focused on the idea of the original discussions to eliminate ND filters but now I can see this is probably only in extreme long exposure situations (minutes).With moving water, unless you can get to ½ second or want “smoke” water with really long exposure times, you’ll need to stick with ND filters. I question whether it will be much use on things like waterfalls. I really don’t want to take a chance on colored artifacts because of all the water moving, and most waterfalls I don’t expose for minutes, more like 5 - 20 seconds.
Certainly a lot more testing to see when it might be useful. In typical lower light situations when I shoot this type of work, I might find it more useful. I didn’t stick around for sunset because I discovered Balboa Beach faces southwest, and in the summer the sun doesn’t set over the water. So original plan of silhouetting the pier into the sunset was a bust.