Art of the Long Exposure

I want to welcome everyone today to the art of the long exposure my name is Jason Odell and I'm a professional photographer in Colorado USA and today is a fun topic because this is something that I've really been excited about for the last several years and goes back way back into when I first got it started in photography so let's get into the presentation today and talk about what I want to present in in the next 45 minutes or so I want to talk about using long exposures as a creative tool for our photography and it's really a powerful tool and it can create some tremendous dynamic images if you do it right and it's really fun great technique that I really enjoy and can be used for just about anything so it's what makes it so wonderful I'll spend a little bit of time talking about how to capture long exposures in the field and then we'll talk about some other creative ideas that are related to long exposures but maybe not done with a traditional long exposure technique let's start by talking about the temporal or time component of photography and this is what's going to be so important because as of as a medium as a creative medium photography is pretty special we think about capturing a moment in time but there's a technological piece to photography whether we're talking about images on film or a digital whatever that makes things interesting when you start capturing images that are more than fractions of a second so in order to capture or record an image whatever you're using the light the the film the digital sensor heck a glass or even a metal plate you've got to stimulate that light-sensitive medium and in order for that to work you you can do it two different ways the first way is to make sure that there's intense enough light falling on your film your sensor but the other way that works is by allowing light to hit the sensor or film for a longer amount of time and with film and with with silver emulsions this was true even if the if the light was too dim an image wouldn't be recorded it was too dark but if you allow light to accumulate onto the image it will create the image to appear it will it will cause the sensitive transition either the chemical change or in the case of digital cameras it will allow the the sensor to capture an image and that's an interesting thing because you're accumulating light over time and that is best shown in early photographs and this is one of the earliest photographs ever this is a daguerreotype by de Guerre on a busy street the boulevard du Templar in Parris and he captured this image using metal plates the Garrow type image and the interesting thing about this photograph is that it is considered to be the first known photograph of people and and if you look here the people way here in the corner here there are the there there's this guy he's probably getting a shoe shine or a boot polish whatever and nothing else is out there everything is empty nothing just buildings and trees and the street so what's going on here what's happening is with these early daguerreotype plate images the effective ISO was really low the sensitivity of the medium was incredibly low so they had to allow light to accumulate over a long period of time and otherwise you wouldn't get an image so this image probably took several minutes three to five minutes to capture maybe longer and because of that objects that were moving transient moving objects didn't hold still long enough to be captured in the final image that's why we only see the trees the buildings and this guy down here getting a shoe shine so when we look at history we look at the evolution of photography from a technical standpoint what we've got is a situation where we started in the 1800s with glass plates of metal plates and the ISO would be considered to be less than five okay so really low sensitivity and that meant to sit there for a portrait you had to hold still for minutes at a time or certainly several seconds and that's why there weren't a lot of pictures of people back in those days we moved to film in the in the you know 1900s early 20th century we were able to increase the sensitivity of the medium so you know Kodachrome came out it was iso 25 and and there was film out there that was all the way up to 1600 in some cases 3200 but it was pretty ugly grainy stuff but that meant you could capture exposures that were easily less than a tenth of a second in most cases and it meant in normal daylight conditions you could capture photographs without using a tripod and having to hold still you could get a snapshot and certainly now with digital which which came out in the late 80s we're able to crank the ISO up on our camera to ridiculous amounts you know 204,000 in some cases that means it's very easy to not get subject blur camera shake you can get shutter speeds of less than a millisecond in some cases like this hummingbird picture that I captured very easy we all think about new digital cameras how high ISO can it be because we want to shoot in the dark and the whole idea behind that is we want to be able to use our camera and capture our images without blurring them without having to use a tripod you want to be able to shoot indoors and all these things and we can do that today because digital cameras are very sensitive but what I want to talk about in this presentation is how we can use a long exposure to deliberately get creative and long exposures allow us to transform what would be an otherwise ordinary scene now this first picture I'm going to put up here is a 25 second exposure and you're probably looking at it and say well that's an interesting subject but that's not much going on and you're if you're saying that to yourself right now you're absolutely correct a creative long exposure is not intended to be done just for the sake of saying that you used a 25 or 30 second or two minute long exposure there needs to be a purpose a creative intent behind your images so instead of taking pictures of static bowls of fruit or in this case a barber chair in Eastern State Penitentiary in in Philadelphia you want to use a long exposure creatively and you do that lots of different things you can do you want to convey the passing of time you can blur motion it creates dynamic scene elements from moving objects we can also use long exposures to create negative space in our images and does interesting things with moving subjects like smoothing water enhancing reflections and in doing so it can also remove distracting elements so let me just show you some photographs that I've captured all of which could be considered in their own way a long exposure and long exposure really keep in mind is going to be relative we're talking about images that capture both a moving subject and a static subject and so depending on the speed of the motion of the subject the relative exposure time can can range from from you know less than a second all the way up to minutes long so let me show you that here's Miami Beach and this was a tenth of a second exposure not very long but by using a polarizing filter to get a slightly longer exposure instead of maybe a hundredth of a second or a thirtieth of a second the tenth of a second exposure allows you to see movement and blur motion in the receding waves the surf everything else is relatively static because it's it's either not moving at all or it's moving so slowly that a tenth of a second nothing will blur out so that's that's a case of a fairly short exposure tenth of a second but it still creates subject motion now you can go longer than that here's the Smoky Mountains this is a stream in Smoky Mountain National Park and this is a six second exposure so here you can see that the water becomes very smooth and most of us have probably seen images like this in calendars we say wow that that stream the water looks really interesting it looks all smooth there's very little definition at all in the water you can use long exposures for capturing travel photography here's Central Park in city 81 second exposure you get the combination of the smooth water in the lake and the motion of the clouds creates this dynamic element that would otherwise not be there here's the Venetian hotel in Las Vegas Nevada this is an 80 second exposure and these are the gondolas it's supposed to be like Venice it's in Vegas it's one of the casinos the hotel and you can see that the boats are actually blurred a little bit they were bobbing up and down but the reflections the water gets completely smoothed out and it creates a unique look to this image here's Chicago this is the Buckingham Fountain downtown Chicago this is a 20 second exposure in this particular case that's long enough to smooth and blur out the water the Jets in the fountain and the clouds on this particular day we're moving fairly quickly so you can see the clouds start to streak across the sky when things are going a little bit slower you crank it up a little longer here's the south part of Manhattan this is looking towards lower Manhattan a couple of years ago and this was a 69 second exposure so over a minute long and two things happen the clouds started to create streaks in the sky and the water completely smoothed out so it's an interesting image it's not something that you would get if you were shooting this handheld other subjects though you can do all kinds of funny things with with long exposures I was in Florida and Orlando and this is Lake Eola Park in Orlando Florida and those are the Swans and the ducks and the geese and they were wandering around so I was able to use a filter I got a 30-second long exposure just to see what would happen and the white swans created trails along the water so that was kind of a fun shot it was something different so let's talk about for just a part of this webinar some of the subjects that work for long exposures how we can capture them and the first subject that most all of us have experimented with or certainly seen examples of is long exposures of water and water is a great subject for a long exposure because you don't need ridiculously long exposures in some cases you can get a long exposure with just using a tripod and maybe a polarizer and you ain't on an overcast gloomy day like this is molten lava falls in Oregon near Portland and with very little added filtration I get along you know several second exposure and you get the waterfall smoothes out like that so let's look at these waterfalls and what I want to show you what the next series of images is how water changes appearance as you extend the exposure time as you let that light accumulate on the sensor so here's your typical this is a half second exposure so this is kind of slow the water is moving fast you can see that there's some definition in the water and in the waterfalls but if we bump this up to eight seconds it starts to get very soft look at the waterfall now almost looks like fog and if we go even longer to 20 seconds it really gets almost a vaporous look so you can explore and try different things by changing your long exposure you can go from you know fifteenth of a second and freeze the motion in the water go all the way to 20 or even 30 seconds and get vapor and one of the things with with the waterfalls and streams if you're going to photograph them it's really important when you go long that you're focusing on things like these rocks in the image if you focus on the static the non moving object they need to be sharp so think about that when you're setting up your shot because what happens is the water starts to just completely smear out and things that your eye would notice in real life become disappeared and just transformed into almost a gaseous state you can also use a long exposure when you just to work with reflection so here was a morning on a workshop a couple of years ago that I was leading out in Colorado here and this was morning on one of the lakes out in the Rockies and you know there was just a little bit of winds you had the ripples on the water so I went ahead and took this shot this was a twenty-fifth of a second kind of your normal conditions for early morning I went ahead and used a solid neutral density filter and I ended up with at 83 second exposure and with the 83 second exposure look how different the water looks now it's completely smooth and the reflections become a more dominant element of the scene we've got this little piling in the foreground there that really stands out because the ripples no longer distract your eye and that's great use of long exposure another wonderful subject of course is moving clouds these are clouds moving over the carhenge installation it's a it's an art installation in alliance Nebraska and these clouds are actually moving very fast this is about a 15 or 20 second long exposure and and because the clouds are moving fairly quickly I didn't need to use one of those really you know multiple minute long exposures but let's look and see how long exposure transforms clouds I was doing some scouting up in near Aspen Colorado for a workshop that I was going to lived it this is independence ghost town and independence pass in Colorado and this is what happens when you show up to a place in the middle of the day or this is about 10:00 in the morning or so a nice picture blue sky postcard kind of day this is your what you normally get I captured this this is you know just regular daylight exposure I then decided let's see what happens if I put on some neutral density filters so I put on filters darkened it up and I captured about a minute and a half long exposure and this is what happened the clouds which were slowly moving across the sky these wonderful painterly patterns and what I really love about this image is that the patterns you can't predict how they're going to come out when you're out there in the field photographing scenes you just kind of have to to take your chances and hope for the best and that's one of the things I really like about long exposures is that there's that element of surprise you never are quite sure what you're going to get when you work with these images another example here's Badlands National Park in South Dakota it's a place that I like to go and lead workshops at and wonderful place when you get clouds here's the regular shot probably about a 25th or 30th of a second put on the neutral density filters and I got a one and a half minute or so exposure and it's wonderful you get the dynamic element of the clouds moving up the the over the sky the other really common thing we like to photograph with long exposure images are moving vehicles and moving lights and moving lights on vehicles these are cars going in front of the Washington Monument in Washington DC and this was captured right at Twilight during the blue hour so you can get a pretty long exposure just because it's dark outside but there's lots of different ways to do it and again how long you choose to make your exposure is going to have impact to the overall scene so let's take a look at San Antonio down the Riverwalk here's the water taxi and in this case if I had used a really long exposure like 30 seconds or a minute the water taxi would have disappeared entirely you wouldn't have seen anything maybe just the light going by so instead this is about a about a 2 or 3 second long exposure just long enough to get the motion blur again you want to convey movement in your photographs and by using the longer exposure on the tripod that's what this shot does I'm really not interested in seeing the faces of the tourists on the water taxi but the water taxis are iconic part of this area of San Antonio and so by using the long exposure I'm able to show that movement capture that motion and create a dynamic element to my image that I wouldn't have gotten with just a regular photograph you move on a little bit darker at night and you can start doing car trails those are fun this was Chicago last month and this was in front of the Chicago Theatre and we just set up our are we set up our scene there and this is about an eight second exposure and I waited for the lights to change and when the lights change the car started moving coming in front of me they created these trails you get the headlights creating the trail is really quite fun and just to be a little different I chose to compose this one not level I went with the tilted camera look and I thought it was kind of cool the way it ended up capturing the scene so all the city lights work out just great and then lastly this is one of the first images that I ever photograph this is a scan of Kodachrome film from 1984 and I was doing a school photography class project and I went to the fair and I loved the tripod around and so this was a bulb exposure and I certainly couldn't tell you how long it was but a couple of seconds long set up with the camera and you know wait a few weeks to get the film back get the slides back and you get the get the result and it was pleasantly surprising you get the delight trails from the carnival ride so that's really fun so those are some subjects let's talk about some other uses for long exposures because I've already alluded to some with the subjects but you can use long exposures to do other creative to suit creative needs depending on what you're trying to photograph and one of these is creating negative space and negative space can be quite useful because it it is emptiness that draws your eye towards the subject now here I was set up on a really crummy windy overcast gloomy day in upstate New York and this is a pier on on one of the Finger Lakes and it was a terrible day for really anything and as you can see if I take this picture you've got competition between the waves and the pier so I went ahead and used the filter to get a longer exposure and when I did that all of those distracting ripples disappeared and created negative space and the clouds also made an interesting pattern in the sky but what I wanted you to see with this image is that now your eye is drawn towards the subject which is the pier it is no longer competing with the waves and the ripples so it's a real fun thing to do as long as you've got a tripod and the necessary equipment to to make this kind of capture waves and ripples on water and creating negative space is one way of removing distractions really long exposures can remove other kinds of distractions so here's the Washington excuse me the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC this is right this is in the winter time lots of people and and you've got the Sun going down in the background so this was late late afternoon early evening just before sunset and this is the the normal kind of you know you set up and you take your test shot and this is what you get when I went with the long exposure a couple of things happen first thing that happens is obviously the motion of the clouds gets really interesting so this is about a two minute long exposure and the clouds create this really wonderful dynamic element in the sky at just really cool that I just like how they appear to be radiating and emanating from the Lincoln Memorial itself that's just you know me getting lucky but the other thing you might notice is that all those people that are on the steps they seem to have been reduced in number and that's because the moving people just like with the daguerreotype that I showed you earlier only the stationary people are visible so it cut down on some of the clutter of all the tourists going up and down the steps you can still see them but but they're much less noticeable except for those three people in the left-hand corner that they must have been hanging out having a conversation the same thing happened over at the World War Two memorial in DC beautiful memorial it also is just crazy crowded with people so we've got this wonderful subject here's you got the fountains here and the reflecting pool but there's people everywhere this is a bus drop-off spot so there's just tons of tourists roaming around so I went with the longer exposure again about a minute and a half two minutes long and not only now am i smoothing out the fountain which is cool but I'm also getting rid of the people you can sort of see little blurry ghosts where the people were but they're no longer distracting elements you really don't notice them unless you know what you're looking for in this particular shot so those are all the different things you can do with long exposures but the question is how do you do it how do you get a long exposure in the field and to do that I want to talk a little bit about the principles of exposure just really briefly because the this is what this is the mechanics of how it all works so there are four components to any shot when you're using a camera the amount of light you have in the scene you have the ambient light and then your camera settings the shutter speed the aperture and the ISO and they all relate to each other and some of you have maybe seen one of these before this is that exposure triangle it shows the relative relationships between these three camera settings and and how they all interact so if you look at this you can see that as ISO goes up shutter speed becomes faster it goes down shutter speed Incred it shutter speed decreases as aperture opens up from f-22 to you know something fast at one point four shutter speed increases and so all of these are linked together if you use a high ISO you're going to have a faster shutter speed for any given aperture if you use a wide aperture you'll have a faster shutter speed at any given ISO so these three things relate to each other and you can go through camera settings to try to control the exposure in the field so we give you another example of that and I'm going to use the sunny 16 rule and this is that old rule that was you know printed on the inside of the box of film when you when you bought it give you suggested settings for exposure but the sunny 16 rule is quite simple it says it says that if you're in a bright sunny day and you set your camera at f-16 then the shutter speed that works is one divided by the ISO so if the camera is ISO 100 you would have 1/100 of a second at ISO 100 at f-16 so we can plot that out so here is a plot of shutter speeds at different apertures all assuming ISO 100 and sunny 16 conditions sunny conditions so they are at f-16 it's 1/100 of a second and what you can see is the shutter speed gets faster and faster as you open up the aperture well that's really not what we're trying to do here we're trying to go the other direction we're trying to get a slow shutter speed so the only way I can really make the shutter speed slower in this particular example is I stopped down the lens to f-22 and then I get a 50th of a second and you're saying well Jason that's 50 for the second that's still you know I can hold that and get a pretty sharp shot that's not very slow so the other thing you could do with your camera is lower the ISO so depending on your camera you might have a low one or a you know low - one setting on your camera if you do that you can see that now you can get instead of 1/100 of f-16 you're now 150th at f/16 and if you go to f-22 you get a twenty-fifth of a second so slower but that's still not really slow now sometimes conditions are going to going to be different so how do you actually go along with your exposures well the obvious thing is you know you could just restrict yourself to shooting at Twilight err or or night but that's not what we're really here and that's fun and it works but that's not the idea so we talked about stopping down we talked about using a low ISO one of the things I like about um the Nikon d810 which I picked up last year is that it's base ISO is 64 and if I go too low - 1 I'm now at 32 so I get a pretty low ISO on my camera but there are physical limitations you can only stop the lens down so much and you can only set your camera to its lowest ISO and in fact there are reasons why purists would say you shouldn't do that um when you when you go to the low out of spec is OS depending on your camera you might not get quite the dynamic range in color tone that you would get using the base ISO so there's always an advantage of shooting at your camera's base ISO but some cameras have a base ISO of 200 so that can be a problem if you stop down that works but again your lens only stops down to you know f-22 or some variable aperture lenses will go farther than that but what happens when you stop down is that you can get softening of fine details called diffraction artifacts in your images so it is perfectly valid to do all these things but you potentially give up a little image quality when you do that but to get the really long exposures especially in the middle of the day we've got to go with the last bullet point here which is use some kind of filter and filters neutral density filters called solid or variable neutral density filters there's two kinds and these are some illustrations of them different kinds of filters they're just dark glass in some cases resin the glass ones are better they're dark they're like sunglasses for your camera they block light coming in so by reducing the amount of light it's like artificially creating nighttime conditions you then need to use a long exposure to let that light accumulate on the sensor so I want to talk about the two different kinds briefly the first one is called a solid neutral density filter these come in calibrated densities you can get them in you know one stop three stops five stops 10 15 20 stops and they come in a lot of different form factors so this picture here is my Nikon d4 and this is a square glass Singh ray Moore's low filter this is a 10 stop filter and it's in this rectangular holder called Ali foundations kit okay it's just it's the same kind of holder that works with this rectangular graduated neutral density filters now graduated neutral density filters are a different topic those are used to balance exposure and you can use a graduated filter with a solid filter like this if you have this kind of arrangement but just briefly you can get them in square you can get them in ring mount and there's pros and cons to both kinds okay and you know they're I could go into this in in detail but we'd be here for a really long time but you know the nice thing about ring mount filters is that they're very easy they're sturdy they're in a they're in a metal ring they're easy to pack and you can use your lens hood all good square mount filters a little bit more cumbersome to use in the sense that you've got to put them in this holder you've got to have rings it's set you've got to have adapters but they have some advantages and they're the ones that I actually use and recommend but again it's a personal decision you can get different adapter rings for each of your lenses regardless of the lens diameter so they would fit on the same holder so you can buy one filter with one holder and then just buy inexpensive adapter rings because these Singh ray filters they cost over $300 they're they're expensive really expensive but they're they're good they're um they're glass filters that they don't produce artifacts or nasty colorcast and I've used other brands of filters I don't recommend them I really don't I've tried other brands they all are subject to nasty color casts and you really want to avoid using resin plastic resin filters especially stacking them because you will make really ugly artifacts in your shots okay so you want to go with glass filters and and you know you want to try to get something decent if you're you're into that so I use these you know you can you can combine them with you know your grad filters or whatever they're just a little bit more delicate because they don't have that nice ring around the edge to to screw on the other kind of filter and the these solid neutral density filters I should point out these are the ones you use when you want to go really long dark because you can get these in the 10 15 20 stops and I like having a 10 and a 5 stop filter sometimes 10 is enough but other times I want to go with 15 and I went in anytime I'm doing the bright daylight shots 15 stops of filtration is a pretty good place to be because it lets me have some creative control over the exposure if I have 15 stops I can go really long or I can open up the aperture and go a little shorter if I want to a 10 stop filter will not get you enough shutter speed in bright conditions you'll end up with maybe a second exposure in those sunny 16 conditions now the other filter that you may have heard of is something called a variable neutral density filter and this picture here shows what happens when you turn them as the name implies they're user-adjustable and they usually give you between three and nine you know or three to eight stops of filtration these are great for extending your exposure a little bit but they suffer from two really significant problems and this is all of them regardless of how expensive your filter is okay there's there's ones that are better than others these filters are thick they are effectively two polarizing filters together and when you rotate polarisers they darken so what happens is these thick filters if you use them on a wide angle lens like your sixteen to thirty five or you know 24 to 70 at wide focal lengths you're going to see the filter vignette you're going to actually see the edges of the filter because it's thick it sticks out beyond the the lens barrel there so that's a potential problem but the real the bigger problem is that they're really prone to creating these nasty polarization artifacts that look like dark crosses in the middle of your sky and this happens when you crank them up to near their maximum settings so depending on the scene if you're if you're photographing a waterfall no big deal you're not going to you're not you don't have a sky but if you're photographing a sky and you're trying to get you know eight or nine stops of filtration variable neutral density filter is not the one to use okay so I use these when I'm for like the picture in the Smoky Mountains that I showed you at the beginning where you need to get you know somewhere between you know five and fifteen seconds and I'm in a scene where I don't have a sky and I can extend the exposure that way it works great for that but again I have some limitations with it so those are the tools that you use on them of course the other things that kind of go without saying is you're going to want to use good techniques you need a tripod and mirror lock and a cable release and all those things that go into getting sharp shots when you're doing a slow exposure but those are the tools those are the two primary tools that you're going to use to get extended exposure time in daytime conditions the last thing I want to talk about is some other techniques that you can do that that are related to but not entirely long exposures themselves and the first one is camera and lens movement okay so what what I want to talk about is if you're capturing exposure either because deliberately or just because of the conditions that that's a little longer than normal that might create camera shake or blur you can do some deliberate things to create your own kind of creative images and and the first one I'm going to show you is one that you've probably heard of before and that's panning so here I'm in New York City and I'm panning the camera and I'm probably shooting at about a you know 15th or a tenth of a second so a slow enough shutter speed to create motion and what I'm trying to do is follow the subject along so that it's relatively sharp but now you see the foreground and background becomes blurred and it conveys that sense of motion by everything having motion blur to it okay so this is different than if I was you know doing a long exposure on a tripod where I'm trying to blur the subject and have the background be all static and in focus so that's something different now another if you take this to a slightly different creative extreme we could talk about something called a swipe now here this is wildflowers in Colorado and I stopped down all the way and and just set my camera in the lowest ISO this is about a fifteenth of a second exposure and I made a real fast pan if you will or a swipe of the camera downward I just held the button down and you just do this a bunch of times and you know you trial and error it and you can do them left/right up/down so I decide whichever way you want to do but the result was cool because all those colorful wildflowers became with a motion blur even though they weren't moving at all so I moved the camera to create this effect other things you can do you can also rotate the camera so here's a long exposure of about I don't know second or two so to do this one I was on a tripod I was on a tripod I've stopped him down and used the filter and got about a two-second exposure and I was using a 70 to 200 millimeter lens and the reason I use that lens is because it has a tripod collar to mount to the tripod so I loosen the tripod collar I took the picture that I could rotate the camera around the the collar without having to you know do any funny handheld things I get this nice circular pattern you can play around with rotating the camera if you got a zoom lens and a long exposure you can zoom the lens during your exposure so here's that same place in Chicago that I showed you the car trails from this is from that same evening and I used a a 24 to 120 millimeter lens and I just turned the zoom ring during about I don't know one or two second exposure so that gives you this kind of cool zoom explosion effect so there are things that are long exposures that can show motion but you can create the motion from your camera rather than the subject moving itself and that can be really fun to do in all kinds of different conditions and you can try this with filters in the daytime or like this shot you can try it at nighttime you just have to have that tripod and know what you're doing with your camera now I will mention of course things you can do at night and in Twilight because obviously at Twilight or at night you're going to naturally have a long exposure now usually the idea of nighttime photography or Twilight photography it is not necessarily capturing motion you know we're not doing a long exposure because we want to we're doing a long exposure because that's what you need to expose the scene properly but there's things you can do if you're going to take a 30-second exposure or something you have time to do stuff in between so the first one thing you can do is lightning so this is Garden of the Gods here in Colorado Springs near where I live and I was doing long exposure because it was dark it was nighttime and I got the stars in the sky and the clouds were moving and that was cool when we waited I was with a colleague of mine and that we waited until a car in this case this is a motorcycle came driving through the scene and we knew that the light from the from passing traffic would create this cool leading line but the problem was is that everything else was really dark and that mountain in the background that rock formation was really dark so I use one of those big 2 million power candle power spotlights actually two of us shining a light during our 30 second exposure to add light to the foreground subject exactly where we wanted it to want to be so that worked out really great and that's like painting is a whole topic unto itself other people may have seen the next kind of image where you take steel wool and you light it on fire and trust me this is not something you want to do in places that have a lot of dry brush because you can start smoky bear will be very mad at you so if you're going to do this you need to make sure that you're prepared to extinguish any anything that starts up but you can wrap steel wool into a wire whisk you know those cheap metal wire whisks that you get for cooking and then put that on a cord and you light it on fire and when you spin it around in a circle you try not to hit yourself with it it really ignites and it sends off Sparks and so this was probably a 15 or 20 second exposure long enough to capture the moving light and then if you really want to have fun you can bring your own light to the party in other ways too some people like to use flashlights to draw with light I got this thing from a Kickstarter called a pixel stick it's really cool it's a six foot long LED handle that pulsates different colors you can program it with different patterns and it makes these cool ribbons and patterns you twirl it around but in order for it to work you've got to have you know be working in Twilight sort of darkened conditions otherwise you won't see it show up at all so you know Twilight and evening photography can be fun for other things just because you're already working with a longer shutter speed to begin with just to capture the scene the last thing I want to talk about though is something that you might not have thought about as a long exposure technique but it also shows the passing of time and that's multiple exposures a couple of different ways of doing multiple exposures the first one is with your camera if it's got a multiple exposure mode so I set up a d-- nikon d800 i put it in continuous advanced mode you know just you know continuous frame advanced with 3 frames a second or whatever it was going to do I set it to capture 10 exposures in one frame and that's a menu item in your camera you'll have to refer your owners manual to see if your camera offers it and some cameras give you a two shots other ones will give you maybe 10 so this was the wind turbines out in eastern Colorado and if I had done a traditional long exposure here if I just said oh let me do a 3 second exposure a 5 second exposure what would happen is that you wouldn't see the turbine blades at all they would completely disappear there'd just be a blur so in order for me to show that they were moving and still capture them and show the passing of time I did the multiple exposure and just fired off 8 or 10 frames and then the camera produced the final composite image which was pretty cool so you get these neat little you know flowers out of the the wind turbines and I just liked how that looked but you can also combine multiple exposures in-camera with long exposures for creative things so I was shooting handheld at the Spanish market in San Antonio Texas and I did a multiple exposure to shots the first one was these our little toy guitars I did a handheld shot just normal settings fast enough shutter speed to get a sharp shot handheld then I stopped way down close the lens all the way down and that met the exposure was going to be maybe half a second and I zoomed and trial-and-error again but the zoom was then overlaid on top of this still shot the normal shot and you get this cool composite image you can also move the camera when you're doing multiple exposures so here is patterns on a walls of you know art and I just like the flowers and what I did was I did ten shot multiple exposure and I rotated my camera manually I just kept my focus point more or less on that Center flower in the middle there and took ten shots and the result was an in-camera multiple exposure that looks like this no matter what kind of camera you have though there are going to be limits to what it will do with multiple exposures my camera will do ten but as I mentioned your camera might only do to three shots what if you wanted to do something with more than ten photographs well then you can start to look at ways of stacking things and making composites in Photoshop and you would capture something called an image sequence using either continuous advance on your camera or if you want to be a little bit more fancy about it you use your intervalometer and when you do that here's an image that is a composite of over a hundred frames shows the passing of about five or more minutes but instead of one continuous transition of smooth movement in the clouds in the sky because I had a several second gap between each image I get a very different appearance so this is if I had done this as a long exposure with one shot neutral density filters you would have these streaks across the sky instead I captured 100 images three seconds apart or so and I combined them in Photoshop to make this cloud stack and here's another one that I did same idea this was I think 120 shots this one was almost 10 minutes worth of time these were very slow-moving billowing clouds and the result is quite painterly and you can post-process these however you want to get unique looks on this finally there's going to be times where you just need to add your own motion effects because either you were unable to capture a long exposure or maybe you have an image that you think would look cool if you did something to it but you were unable to capture a long exposure so you can add motion filters with your post processing software usually Photoshop so here's an aspen grove and i wasn't thinking when i was taking pictures of these Aspen's about the patterns they might make if I had what I should have done was a swipe or something like that but I didn't have that so there's a filter in Photoshop called motion blur it's built into Photoshop and you can apply it and you're going to make any direction you want so I applied it in a vertical up-and-down orientation and just played with the settings until it looked look the way I want and I ended up producing this really nice colourful abstract of fall Aspen's out of what was originally just a still shot it was just nothing special about it all I just like the colors and the stripes and the patterns other times you want to add your own another filter you can use is the radial filter a radial blur filter in Photoshop this is an infrared image and in my infrared camera I got a lot of things working against me to try to do a long exposure my infrared camera the one that I use has a base ISO of 200 so I'm already and I can't set it any lower that the mat and capture a raw file it's a fundamental limitation of the camera so I'm at 200 to begin with that's as low as I can get and then the other really funny thing is that a 10 or 15 stop neutral density filter doesn't block nearly as much infrared light so even if I was using a fill - like my 15 stops worth of filter by 10 in my 5 I might only get about 5 or 6 stops worth of filtration and if you do the math on that with the kind of conditions I was in I might have gotten you know a half a second exposure or you know something like that or maybe a second not enough so here I faked it I used the radial blur filter in Photoshop the radial blur filter has a toggle button that says zoom blur so it'll spin or it'll zoom so I did the zoom blur and then just applied it using layer masks to keep everything else and focus it made the clouds look like they were moving even though they were not and another one that works really well is or if you've got the Nik collection analog effects Pro is one of the filter plugins that comes with that suite but it has a zoom and motion blur filter built-in as well and you can use that in Photoshop so that is a in a nutshell I was I'm hoping that I exposed you to a variety of creative ideas to get you thinking about long exposures how you might use it in your own photography because I think it's really fun it's something different it really can make a shot of something that everybody has seen before more dramatic more interesting and if you're looking especially if you're traveling if you're trying to capture something differently you know iconic landmarks or whatever a long exposure can go a long way to you know solving some of those problems you know you create these dynamic images as long as you got something like moving clouds moving water you know erase people it can do all these things for you it's really nice the so what I want to leave you with is your where to go from here I want to thank everybody for coming to the webinar today I'm sure as most of you are aware last week I published my brand new e-book on long exposure photography and if you go onto my website luminescent photo calm you can order it there if you haven't already it's a you can download it and the discount code for coming today is webinar 15 that'll get you 15% discount off of the web price and then I also have an arrangement with sing array filters where they will give my customers 10% off of their filters which doesn't sound like much but if you're thinking about a these are the best filters they're the ones I recommend they just aren't prone to artifacts and color casts like like some of the ones I've used and they have a 10% discount code if you if you are interested in buying some of any of their filters you can get 10% off with that code so I want to thank you all for coming today and and I will look for you in the future hopefully very soon

Channel: Jason Odell

Views: 339,414

Keywords: digital photography, long exposure photography, Photography (Visual Art Form)

Id: mgGwRqpGaNc

Length: 53min 15sec (3195 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 02 2015