Long Exposures
By Adam Booth posted 26/08/08
When taken correctly long exposures can appear very professional even with the most basic cameras. This means that you don’t have to have a top of the range camera to get good results from this technique almost every camera has the setting to perform a long exposure. One of the main pieces of equipment that is needed for long exposures as well as a camera is a tripod. A tripod or something to hold your camera steady is essential for these sorts of shots to work. Without one the entirety of the photograph will be blurred due to the movement of your hands.
One of the most difficult aspects of long exposure photography is getting the correct exposure. Numerous factors come into play from light source: moon, artificial, reflections; to film type and reciprocity. A big advantage for digital cameras is being able to see what you captured immediately, which at least gives you a good idea how many seconds would work best for your image. Nowadays most digital cameras with most digital cameras you can go as far as a 30 second exposure. If your using film it is slightly more hit and miss although if you use a digital camera enough times it starts becoming second nature and you will roughly know how many seconds to expose your image for.
The single greatest method to get the right exposure is a lot of practice, and taking notes of each shot of your shots. Usually all I record is the subject and exposure time. I normally shoot at night which I find a lot harder than so I note the f/stop shutter speed for each shot, I find that doing this helps better my results the next time I go on a shoot. Taking notes is vital if you’ve never done long exposures before as it helps with the learning process and it will make shoots much easier the more you do it.
For research purposes some good photographers to look at for inspiration are Dan Holdsworth, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Rut Blees Luxemburg. I find that looking at professionals is not only an interesting part of photography but it also helps in the learning process of taking a good image. These photographers are interesting to look at before going out shooting to give you an idea of what your images could look like, bare in mind though that these are professional images and it takes years of practice to get to there standard.
I have added some of my own work on the subject to show what results can be achieved. The camera I have used for these images is a ‘Fuji film s9600 digital camera.
All three of these images were done using f/8; I find that using f/8 gives the best results with night time long exposures. The first image has an 8 second shutter speed. I had to do this shot about four times before getting the right result. This was due to the bright white light against the black background.
Image two was a 4 second exposure the shutter speed is much lower than the image 1 as it was taken when there was still natural light in the image. I have also chosen to add this image to show the interesting effect of movement in a long exposure. It was quite windy when I was doing this particular shoot as you can see from the movement of the trees.
Image 3 was a 6 second exposure I have chosen to add this as an example as sometimes taking pictures like this can add a surreal outlook on some scenes.
Remember that the main things you need to achieve a good set of long exposure images are a camera, a tripod, patience and a good eye.
This technique was written by Picture This User Adam Booth. Find more of his work on Flickr.
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danbobs25 said...
Posted on 16/01/2009 19:23
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danbobs25 said...
Posted on 16/01/2009 19:23
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