Tag Archives: queen mary falls

Queen Mary Falls


Queen Mary Falls
Originally uploaded by jezza323

This is Queen Mary Falls itself, in the Main Range National Park (at the very southern end).

Its a 2km loop walk to the bottom of the falls from the carpark and back, little steep at the beginning going down, but not too bad. I wandered down with my camera gear and tripod.

This is the very first shot i ever took with the Hoya NDX400 filter (once I had worked out the exposure). I have found with my body I need to set exposure compensation to +2.0 just to get the correct exposure when using the NDX400 filter. This isnt a real problem as generally I will be wanting to use exposures longer than 30 secs anyway, which means ill be into bulb mode territory.

This was shot using the Pentax K200D, Pentax SMC DA 18-55 AL II kit lens, Hoya NDX400 filter and Slik 500DX Pro tripod. It was processed in Lightroom 2.5 but I can’t quite remember what I did with it…

Hoya NDX400 (ND400) filter

I have finally given in and bought myself a good quality ND filter. I went with the Hoya NDX400 (9-stop) filter. I bought this filter as the only 2 filters I am confident of the quality with are this, and the B+W 110 (10-stop) filter, but the B+W in the 52mm size required for my kit lens is quite a bit more expensive than the Hoya. I bought the filter from Citiwide on ebay. They are a Hong Kong based ebay store, and the service was excellent. The filter was shipped the very next day after payment was made. It did take a little while to get here from Hong Kong, but I expected that.

I took the filter out for its first real use on the weekend when I went camping at Queen Mary Falls, not far from Killarney on the Darling Downs in Queensland. I took a few shots of the falls, starting off without the filter, then with the filter for a comparison. I will post up the results tomorrow. Its a beautiful area, and I will be posting a number of shots from around there over the next week or so, the previous photo of the Condamine River Head Waters is the first posted shot from the NDX400 filter, so I will post it again, just to make sure.

This filter certainly puts the cheap one I had previously to shame :) The colours are only slightly warmer than usual, but this might just be a white balance detection problem with the filter on more than colours themselves.