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DJI Pocket 2 // CREATIVE SHOTS (Cinematic Video, Timelapses & Light Painting) // Freewell ND filter
The creative possibilities are limitless using the DJI Pocket 2 + Freewell Neutral Density (ND) filters! I will teach you three techniques to capture more cinematic video (using motion blur), create better timelapses and hyperlapses and snap some very cool photos using light painting. We will be using the DJI Pocket 2 as our main camera, but this works with smartphones, DSLR and mirrorless cameras. All you need is an additional ND filter! @Freewell Gear offered me the filters to test them out so I will make a short review of these ND filters at the end of this video. Are you ready to unlock your creativity?
🎥 Gerald Undone Motion Blur Tests https://youtu.be/UPPSdCrqcFQ
🔗 Freewell ND Filters for the DJI Pocket 2 https://geni.us/freewell-nd
🔗 Freewell VND for DSLR/Mirrorless https://geni.us/freewell-vnd-dslr
🔗 DJI Pocket 2 https://geni.us/dji-pocket-2-combo
✨ WATCH NEXT ✨
- DJI Pocket 2 Review https://youtu.be/j35Xy3ibRxc
- DJI Pocket 2 vs Google Pixel 4a https://youtu.be/ufs2ywGasC8
- Astrophotography with a phone https://youtu.be/LwnMOsq0Mpk
✋ COME SAY HI!! ✋
- Instagram: @loic.bellemare.alford (http://bit.ly/lba_instagram)
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/loic294
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lbaphotographie
📖 CHAPTERS 📖
00:00 - Introduction
00:33 - Why Freewell NDs?
01:17 - Techniques overview
01:44 - Why use ND filter for video?
02:10 - What is motion blur?
03:06 - How to capture cinematic video with motion blur
04:19 - What ND to select?
06:18 - Why ND are used for timelapses and hyperlapses
06:50 - Capturing hyperlapses
08:06 - Capturing timelapses
09:17 - What is light painting?
10:20 - Capturing light trails for light painting
14:05 - Freewell Bright Day ND Review
16:35 - Conclusion - Thanks for watching!
🖼 SHOP FOR PRINTS 🖼
- My online store: https://store.lbaphotographie.ca
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- Affiliate link for Epidemic Sound: https://www.epidemicsound.com/referral/iu5gau/
📸 GEAR I USE ON YOUTUBE 📸
https://kit.co/loic.bellemare.alford/youtube-gear
- DJI Pocket 2 Creator Combo https://geni.us/dji-pocket-2-combo
- 128 gb MicroSD card https://geni.us/sandisk-extreme-128gb
- Canon 6D Mk https://geni.us/canon-6d-mkii
- Google Pixel 4a https://geni.us/google-pixel-4a
- Canon ZOOM LENS EF24-105mm F4L IS II USM https://geni.us/canon-lens-24-105
- Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8 Lens https://geni.us/canon-lens-16-35
- Canon EF 70-200mm f/4.0L-IS II USM Lens https://geni.us/canon-lens-70-200
- VANGUARD VEO 2 265CB CARBON FIBER TRIPOD https://geni.us/vanguard-veo-265cb
- DJI MAVIC AIR https://geni.us/lba-dji-mavic-air
🌍 MY PERSONAL WEBSITE 🌍
#lightpainting #cinematicvideo #djipocket2
- 0:00 Introduction
- 0:33 Why Freewell NDs?
- 1:17 Techniques overview
- 1:44 Why use ND filter for video?
- 2:10 What is motion blur?
- 3:06 How to capture cinematic video with motion blur
- 4:19 What ND to select?
- 6:18 Why ND are used for timelapses and hyperlapses
- 6:50 Capturing hyperlapses
- 8:06 Capturing timelapses
- 9:17 What is light painting?
- 10:20 Capturing light trails for light painting
- 14:05 Freewell Bright Day ND Review
- 16:35 Conclusion - Thanks for watching!
hello everyone today we are talking about nd filters instead of only talking about how to use nd filters to get more cinematic video i also want to talk about creative techniques like time lapses hyperlapses and light painting where you can use a nd filter for this video i'm going to be using my dji pocket 2 with some freewell nd filters but these techniques work with whatever camera you have whether it's your smartphone dslr or mirrorless camera you're going to see this video is going to be a fun one [Music] for those of you who are new to this channel i'm like ben mahafford a young photographer and filmmaker on the journey to become better at this art after making my last video where i compared the dji pocket 2 with the google pixel 4e freewheel reached out and offered me some of the filters for the dji pocket 2. i accepted to make this review because i bought their nd filters from my calendar dslr last summer and loved them i also considered buying some of the filters from my dji osmo pocket multiple times i'm not paid to make this video and freewell won't see the video or cannot comment before you do with this out of the way let's get started i will start by talking about how to get more cinematic video by using nd filter and then i'm going to move on on using the nd filters to capture time lapses and hyperlapses and finally i'm going to move on to the coolest example where we're going to use nd filters to get some light trail and do some light painting if you want to skip through the video you can use the chapters down below when reviewing the dji pocket 2 i mentioned that the one thing that was missing from the creator combo kit was some good nd filters if you don't know what our nd filters are why they are useful i didn't know either for the longest time the easiest way to describe any filters is as being sunglasses but for your camera now you might be wondering why we would want to have sunglasses on the camera because usually you want to have the most light possible instead of the sensor and there's one good reason which is motion blur now if you don't know what is motion blur there's one pretty easy way to discover it so if you take your hand in front of you here and you start moving it super fast you're gonna see that your hand is totally blurry when moving it and this is what we call motion blur the problem with most digital cameras is that if you are taking a picture with the auto mode the shutter speed needs to be super high to compensate the fact that you don't have any nd filters on so if we come here we're gonna have to go up to a one over six thousand four hundred to get an exposure that seems to be about right and now if i do the same test here and move it really fast you're gonna see that the hand is completely jittery and it doesn't look natural at all and that's because there's no motion blur every single image is perfectly sharp inside of the video now i still haven't talked about how to get motion blur using a camera for this you want to respect the rule which is double your frame rate it's actually a bit more complex than that so i'm going to link a video from geraldo undone where it goes into more detail about this rule if you don't know what is a frame rate frame rate is the number of images you that you have in every single second of a video so for example if you're using your smartphone it usually takes 30 frames per second which means you get 30 images for every single second of video if you're filming a film you're probably using 24 frames per second or like i'm doing right now because it's a little bit more cinematic for these settings on your camera the dji pocket 2 you first have to go inside of the promos you need to come on the screen here and make sure you select the pro mode um to be on because you want to have access to the manual controls for the image then if you go inside of the exposure here you want to select one over 150 and that's because we want to double our frame rate so the real one we want to have is one over 48 but we don't have that option so we select the one at as close as possible if you were taking slow motion because it's 120 frames per second for most slow motion you would select one over 240 for your shutter speed if we look at the image from the giant pocket 2 we can see that right now i'm completely overblown and it's looking totally terrible and also if we look at the light meter on the little screen here we can actually see that it's over three stops of overexposure so it's really overblown the image right now and this is where the nd filters that freewell sent me come in handy so they sent me a pack of four filters that range from nd8 to nd64 and nd8 means you're blocking one eighth of the light that is coming in and the same idea for the other ones and one eighth of the light is equivalent to three stops so nd8 is free stops nd 16 is four stops and d32 is five stops and nd 64 is a full six stops of light that we're blocking so for this one here i'm actually going to use the nd 64 because i know we're blocking a lot of light and if we put it on we can instantly see that the image is looking a lot better it's a little bit foggy right now so i'm just gonna wipe it up and we're gonna see the image is gonna look much better now if we adjust our iso on the camera here so i'm gonna bring it down to 200 and i start recording we're going to see that now we have perfect motion blur inside of my hand when i'm moving it another pretty neat feature of the dji pocket 2 is you have auto max iso so if you come in an exposure here you can select to have a max iso and that's great because the camera is not very good over a thousand six hundred especially when it's a little bit darker so you can select something that is maximum here and now if we select this we can look at the metering on the screen here so if it's at zero it's at a perfect exposure right now and if it goes up or under that's a sign that you should change your nd filter so this is the way to know that yeah you should change your nd filter is by looking at the metering on the screen to know if you need to put something that's darker or lighter depending on what it's showing [Music] you might not know it but it's very common to use nd filters when taking time lapses and hyperlapses the reason for this is that when you're training video with motion blur you want to replicate what the eye sees and the principle is the same when doing time lapses and hyperlapses because everything is moving so fast you want to have more blur inside of the shot to tell your head that it's actually everything is actually really moving fast but if you have frames that are all very sharp your head is going to think that something is wrong because if everything is moving fast everything should be blurry for our head let's start by talking about hyperlapses for this to work the best you want to be inside of something that's moving pretty fast so for example from a car here's an example i took the other day when going to skiing if we pause the video we're going to see that the trees and also the cars passing by are all blurry and this creates motion blur inside of the shot like we talked before which just makes everything look better one thing you want to know is that you want to go as low as possible on the shutter speed on the dji pocket 2 but there's a limitation on the dji pocket 2 where your minimum shutter speed for hyperlapse needs to be 1 over 25 but if we go down to that point we're still going to need to be using an nd filter because there's too much lights coming in one thing that i need to tell you before i forget this also works better if you have things that are passing by around you so either cars coming towards you or if you're uh somewhere where you have like trees or something like that around to show that you're moving around for example if i was taking a hyperlapse here it wouldn't be the best one because you wouldn't really see any motion around me when i'm moving around this is pretty unrelated but dji added to the dji memo app an option to stabilize the footage from the hyperlapses afterwards so this is definitely something worth checking out if you have the dji pocket too because it makes the footage a lot more smoother now let's move on to time lapses the technique is pretty similar but there's one big limitation with the dji pocket too the problem is that i like taking exposure times of half a second to get some nice blur when things are moving around but i realized that if we go under 1 20th of a second on the dji pocket 2 you cannot have an interval that is less than two seconds that means that if i have an exposure time of half a second i have one second and a half where the dji pocket two is not taking anything during that time and that means the video like outputs is a little bit choppier because you're missing some frames where you're just not getting anything this is not always a problem so for example if we're taking the sky right now here behind me the sunset or something like that it wouldn't be a problem because even if you're missing some frames it won't show up but when i was at tabla filming people from the ski station that was definitely a problem because you see that sometimes you're missing some frames between people moving around and things like that knowing these two techniques should allow you to get a lot more creative shots for example here is an example of long exposure of waterfalls which was pretty cool that i took a few months ago if you've watched the video until now and still haven't subscribed to my channel what are you waiting for go hit that big red subscribe button light painting uses a technique that is very well known in photography long exposures usually in photography we use nd filters to create long exposures which are used to create super smooth water instead of waterfalls or lake or things like that or to create light trails at night from cars passing by or techniques like that we're going to be using this technique but to paint something in a 3d space which is very creative because you can really create whatever you want so for example a few days ago with my sister we decided to paint 2021 inside of the 3d space the challenge that night wasn't capturing the four different shots and merging them together it was actually getting the shots in the first place it needed to be clear enough for my sister to be able to skate without it being dangerous but dark enough for me to capture the light trails and nothing else in the shot this is where having nd filters became really handy because it was still clear enough to be safe for her and dark enough for me to capture what i wanted with the camera now let's capture the shot so you can know how we can actually do it so for this i'm gonna first open the camera and go inside the photo mode so this is pretty obvious because we're taking a picture and then i want to come inside of the menu here and make sure that i'm on the 16 megapixel picture not the 64 because i don't want to be taking four pictures to get the shot so here we're just gonna go after that inside of our manual settings so again you need to be inside of pro mode for this to work and we're gonna go on exposure and make sure that we have our maximum exposure uh possible which is eight second on the dji pocket two then we're gonna go on the iso and bring it down to around something like 200 because it's so dark if it's too high we're gonna have terrible noise inside of it now if i tie this and take a test shot i already did a little bit earlier and i said we have one problem inside of that test shot is that there's too much light inside of the scene because of the christmas lights that i have behind here to actually creating light on the bottom here of the snow and reflecting all around and this means that we have too much light for the light uh trail to actually work so we want something darker in this case so this is where our nd filters come handy again so i'm gonna put on a nd filter and then do a first test shot one pretty important thing i forgot to mention is actually the light that i'm using and for this i'm gonna be using the aperture mc light and this is gonna allow me to change to whatever color i want by only turning the style here but you really don't need to use a light like this one you could use your cell phone and change the color on your screen of your phone to get the exact same results so just use whatever you have as a light source for this another important thing i forgot to say is that your camera needs to be on a tripod for this or at least a stable surface because it needs to be stay perfectly stable during the full eight seconds that we're gonna be taking the shot [Music] [Applause] pretty cool right so i forgot to clarify a few things before shooting the shots so the first one is that when i was taking the pictures i didn't have my video light on i only turned it on to show you when i was moving around what it looked like but that's super important because you need to be 100 dark for the effect to work because if there's other things or the lights around you might start seeing objects you don't want to see talking of objects that disappeared you might be wondering why i disappear in the shots and that's because i'm pretty much all in black with what i'm wearing right now and that means that i don't reflect too much light so if i'm moving pretty fast nothing is reflecting on me or i'm not creating light so in the end i just disappear inside of the shot and that's why you can create these very cool effects by just moving around in the dark you're just gonna disappear in the shot in some of the most more complex scenes so for example for the one with happy new year i actually had to take multiple pictures and stitch them together inside of photoshop so if you're interested to learn how i did that please let me know in the comments below and i might made a video to teach you how you can do it by yourself because you can do so much more once you start combining multiple shots together as you might have realized i really just scratched the surface of what is possible there's so much more you can do so i did simple shapes of circles up and down left to right but there's so much more you can do and the only limit is really your creativity in this case i want this video by giving my thoughts of the freewell nd filters just like the ones i bought from a canon 6d mark ii i really like these filters they're super high quality if we compare them with the ones from polar pro or no filters at all we can see that there doesn't seem to be any problems with the image when removing nd filters you want to look for two things the first one is color cast so you don't want the color to be changing because you have a filter in front of it and you need to check if there's anything inside of the corners but it doesn't seem to be the case with my test from these filters they also come with a polarizing filter built in i didn't test it inside of this video because i think it's gonna be for another video but they basically allowed to get more green and blue out of the shot which is great when you're inside of nature and you really want to get these colors out because that's what your eyes seize pretty well and it also allows to cut reflection so this is great if you're trying to take a video through a window and it's sunny or if you're trying to take pictures of let's see something that's pretty shiny like a car you can use a polarizing filter to cut out these reflections and get less reflection inside of the shot which is pretty great they also come with a hard case which is pretty good because if you put them in their bag or put it in your pocket you're sure that they're not going to get scratched what is a little bit weird is that the case is really big for only four filters inside of it so i wish they would make it a little bit smaller one so you can stick it a little bit easier inside of your pockets one thing that i don't like as much is that when you put them on the dji pocket 2 dji pocket 2 doesn't seem to recognize all the time that these are nd filters that are on and that means that when the camera tries to close it starts hitting the lens on the side which always is a little bit always scary to know if it's going to break or not the the the filters here so this one thing to keep in mind but i hope that dji can fix the camera uh with a firmware update to fix this problem another thing that is not as great is that these are so small that when trying to take them out here with the magnets you usually end up touching them with your hands and this puts oils on the lens and that means that you're getting oil on them and for example right now when i'm outside in the cold the oil freezes and creates uh fog inside of the picture so that's another little thing that's a little bit annoying uh with such small filters but that's not the fault uh freewell that's because the dji pocket 2 is so small and has such a small filter overall i highly recommend these filters i really enjoyed using them i'm going to put the link in the description down below if you're interested in buying some for your dji pocket 2. before the light completely disappears behind me here let's wrap up this video i hope this video inspired you to go outside with some nd filters and get some more creative shots as usual if you enjoyed this video please leave a like below to let me know the next one is gonna be a pretty interesting one where i'm gonna take pictures and videos using the dji pocket 2 and then light pollution filter from freewheel so be sure to subscribe below if you want to learn about that see you in the next one bye you
Video Links
- 🎥 Gerald Undone Motion Blur Tests
- 🔗 Freewell ND Filters for the DJI Pocket 2
- 🔗 Freewell VND for DSLR/Mirrorless
- 🔗 DJI Pocket 2
- DJI Pocket 2 Review
- DJI Pocket 2 vs Google Pixel 4a
- Astrophotography with a phone
- Instagram: @loic.bellemare.alford ()
- My online store
- Affiliate link for Epidemic Sound
- https://kit.co/loic.bellemare.alford/youtube-gear
- DJI Pocket 2 Creator Combo
- 128 gb MicroSD card
- Canon 6D Mk
- Google Pixel 4a
- Canon ZOOM LENS EF24-105mm F4L IS II USM
- Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8 Lens
- Canon EF 70-200mm f/4.0L-IS II USM Lens
- VANGUARD VEO 2 265CB CARBON FIBER TRIPOD
- DJI MAVIC AIR
- http://bit.ly/loicba
What is this video about?
Today I'm showing you how to unlock creative possibilities with ND filters—techniques that work with the DJI Pocket 2, smartphones, DSLRs, or mirrorless cameras. Freewell sent me their ND filter set to test, and I wanted to walk through three practical techniques that genuinely transform your footage.
Getting Cinematic Motion Blur
The first technique is understanding motion blur. Think of your hand moving fast in front of your face—it blurs naturally. Digital cameras, without ND filters, use such fast shutter speeds that they capture everything sharp and jittery instead. The key is following the "double your frame rate" rule: if you're shooting at 24fps, aim for a 1/48th shutter speed (or as close as possible). On the DJI Pocket 2, that means 1/50th. Without ND filters, you'd need to close down the aperture or kill your ISO, but adding ND lets you achieve proper motion blur while keeping good exposure. I tested the Freewell filters—ranging from ND8 to ND64—and they handle the light blocking beautifully.
Timelapses and Hyperlapses
ND filters are standard for timelapses because they add motion blur when everything moves fast. If frames are perfectly sharp during rapid motion, it looks wrong to our eyes. Hyperlapses shot from a moving vehicle (like the skiing footage I showed) benefit most—blurred trees and scenery sell the speed. Timelapses are trickier on the Pocket 2; going below 1/20th shutter speed locks you into minimum 2-second intervals, which can create choppy output. But for stationary subjects like sunsets or waterfalls, ND filters are essential.
Light Painting: The Creative Highlight
My favorite technique is light painting—creating trails in 3D space using long exposures. We set the Pocket 2 to 8 seconds (max exposure), low ISO, and add ND filters to stay dark enough while keeping the scene safe to navigate. Using a light source (I used an Aperture MC light, but your phone works), you paint letters, shapes, or designs in the dark. The challenge is balancing visibility with darkness so light trails show cleanly.
On the Freewell Filters Themselves
These filters are genuinely solid—no color cast, no corner vignetting, and they include a built-in polarizing filter that cuts reflections and deepens greens and blues. The hard case is protective but bulky. One quirk: the Pocket 2 sometimes doesn't recognize them, which can make the camera try to close on the lens. Also, their small size means you'll touch them with your fingers when removing them magnetically, leaving oils that fog up in cold weather. Minor annoyances, but the image quality is worth it.
The creative possibilities really are endless once you start experimenting. ND filters open doors to motion blur, long exposures, and effects that feel impossible on modern cameras without them.