Long Exposure Photography Guide and Tips

hi I'm Gordon from camera lapse and in this video I'm going to show you how long exposures can transform your urban and landscape photography long exposures may be associated with night photography blight stars or City skylines but they can also create a dramatic or mysterious effect during the day during a long exposure anything in motion becomes blurred transforming ocean waves into an eerily smooth surface turning water falls into cascades of ethereal steam and smudging clouds into dramatic streaks across the sky it's also very forgiving on bad weather allowing you to grab moody looking images on overcast days or even in the pouring rain best of all you can achieve great results without any post-processing or even shooting in RAW all the pictures you'll see in this video are JPEGs straight out of the camera with no further adjustments I'll explain the basics in this video but if you'd like to know more check out my book in camera which tells the story behind 100 of my favorite travel photos all JPEGs straight out of camera before we get into the specifics of long exposures and the technicalities I wanted to just briefly mention composition now just because you're using a long exposure doesn't mean that you need to abandon everything you've already learned about frame you shot everything you know and everything you like about daytime landscape photography completely applies with long exposures so if you find that the rule of thirds works for you then continue to apply it here position that point of interest where those rule of third lines intersect each other if you like leading lines go for it because they work really well in long exposures and if you're shooting very very wide angle make sure that you have something close to you saying the corner of the frame because there otherwise that frame is going to look really empty so how long is a long exposure well it can depend 30 seconds maybe enough to smooth the surface of some waves if they're moving fast enough but most long exposure photographers like to expose for at least a minute maybe two minutes sometimes four minutes or longer still put it this way regardless of which you choose these are not the kind of exposures that you're going to handheld regardless of how good the stabilization is in your lens or camera you're going to need a tripod or somewhere steady to place your camera now I've brought a tripod with me for tonight's shoot but I've also shot long exposures from little mini tabletop tripods or even at a push by simply bouncing my camera on a Ledge so long as that camera steady you'll be fine as with all long exposures you'll need to find some way to trigger the shutter without wobbling the camera now most manufacturers would be very happy to sell you a cable release accessory well that may not be necessary what I do for most of my long exposures is just set the camera to itself timer press the shutter release and then to five or ten seconds later it snaps the picture well turn ative li if you want to be a bit cooler you could use a cable release and that will be important if you want to deploy longer exposures for 30 seconds now explain in just a moment if your camera's really sophisticated like this lumix g9 you might even have a Bluetooth shutter remote facility I'll show you how that works I've got my phone connected to the camera over bluetooth when I press the shutter remote control here you can see this interface and when I press the button it takes a picture even better for long exposures I can just pull this down and lock it for as long as I want pretty neat alright now for some basic settings now I was trying to get the effect I won in camera with JPEGs but I'm no fool so I shoot raw plus JPEG that way I've got that raw file if I want to do something like change the white balance more easily later it's also great if you want to turn a color image into black and white or increase that saturation speaking of saturation have a look at your photos Styles I've got the standard mode on here but when I'm shooting color long exposures I like to go for a vivid or Velvia or a kind of more saturated color profile but don't forget your monochrome profiles because they can look really good especially under overcast or rainy conditions however it's okay here so I'm gonna go for the vivid profile moving on the next one to look out for is long exposure noise reduction which here on the Panasonic is called long shutter noise reduction long exposure noise reduction can be very effective at reducing or even eliminating undesirable artifacts that appear in your image during a long exposure things like increased noise speckles or brightly colored hot pixels the trouble with long exposure noise reduction issue camera actually takes a duplicate exposure after the first one lasting exactly the same amount of time but without recording any light so it doesn't record the picture but it does record those nasty artifacts and then afterwards the camera simply subtracts that second image on the first and bingo all of those nasties disappear but the problem is it effectively doubles your total exposure time if you're only exposing for one second it doesn't matter if you just waiting another second if you're exposing for 30 seconds you've got away to another 30 for that long exposure noise reduction to kick in imagine waiting another four minutes after four minute long exposure if the conditions are changing fast likely around sunset or sunrise it's intolerable it's the most long exposure photographers including myself switch it off and then just retouch those blobs out later if they've become obtrusive finally the other thing to look out for when you're doing long exposures is any stabilization whether it's in the lens or your camera's body switch it off because you don't want your camera compensating for any shakes that aren't actually there okay now it's time to discuss some exposure settings and just like normal daytime exposures it's a combination of balancing three settings the shutter speed the aperture or the f-number and the ISO sensitivity that so called exposure triangle for full control over your exposure you want to set your camera to its manual mode this will let you manually select the aperture that should speed on the ISO sensitivity to exactly how you want them the first thing you should do is set your ISO sensitivity to the lowest value on some cameras there will be 100 ISO on this particular model is 200 ISO the reason you want to use the lowest ISO sensitivity on your camera is to minimize noise artifacts and also maximize your potential for those long exposures but it's very important to actually understand what the base sensitivity of your camera is typically 200 ISO on a lot of mirrorless cameras 100 ISO on most DSLRs and on a handful of models 64 hours so these are the values that you want to choose beware however of extended or low sensitivities which allow you to shoot at an effective lower sensitivity again increasing those exposure times but generally at the loss of some quality now that might be a compromise you're willing to take but for the best quality shoot at your base ISO next choose an aperture a focal ratio the f-number and use one that's typical for what you'd use if it was during the day I'm going to start with an aperture of f/8 here and adjust it later on if necessary now at the moment I'm going to ask the camera what exposure it would recommend under these lighting conditions 200 ISO and f8 and it's saying 1/6 of a second now that is way way way way way way way quicker than the 30 seconds or minute we were talking about earlier but let's see how that looks I'm going to switch the camera to it's self timer and we'll have a look at this picture okay there is nothing long about that exposure and if I play that picture back and zoom in you can see that there is still a lot of detail on the water surface this is not what we want so how am I going to get a longest shutter speed if I turn this dial to choose a longer shutter speed let's bring it down to say one second indicated by the quotation marks here then this is giving me a warning it's saying it's going to be massively overexposed let's see how that's going to look that picture is way too bright and that's only a one second exposure what am I gonna do if I want to deploy 30 seconds 60 seconds or even longer I've got too much light normally phone to longest shutter speed I've simply closed down the aperture using a bigger F number or I'd select to lower ISO sensitivity but the problem in this particular scenario is we're kind of up against the wall on both of those values already I've already selected the lowest base sensitivity for the best quality so I can't take that any further and I don't really want to close that aperture anymore otherwise I might bump up against an undesirable optical effect known as diffraction which can actually soften the overall image quality now the point at which diffraction kicks in varies depending on the sensor size the resolution lenses and other factors but generally speaking I tried to shoot apertures or f numbers that are no bigger than f-16 on full-frame f11 on aps-c or f/8 on micro four-thirds if you choose bigger F numbers than those on each of those systems you will begin to see that softening effect of diffraction now it's a compromise you might be willing to accept if it allows you to achieve the exposures you won but I'm after the optimal quality so I'm going to stick to those F numbers or an ideal situations actually go for slightly smaller F numbers for crisper results still so if I'm already at the smallest aperture I'm willing to use and the lowest ISO sensitivity I'm willing to use then and back to square one okay the problem we have is too much light how are you going to reduce the amount of light entering the camera well there's two ways you can do it first wait until it gets darker I've done that plenty of times or maybe shoot under darker conditions like in a forest if you're doing a waterfall but if you can't wait until it gets darker if the sky is the perfect color right now and you've got places to go then what you do is spit a neutral density filter these soak up light without changing the color without changing it too much neutral density filters normally come in two different types there's circular ones that would screw directly into the end of the lens and the square ones that require a filter system a mount holder you might ask yourself why would I want a mount holder I'll tell you why now with the man system you're first of all need to put some sort of adapter on the front of your lens and then here is the actual filter holder which goes in front of here now what you can do is slide your filter into the holder the benefit of having a filter holder is you can actually mount multiple filters and you can also rotate them which can be handy if you're using graduated filters which are darker at one end and Alijah at another it also allows you to position the filter higher or lower or to the sides the most important specification for a neutral density filter is its density how many stops of light is it going to absorb and how many stops is shutter speed is he going to allow you to shoot out slower than normal let's take a three-stop ND filter for example well that's going to let you do is extend your exposure by three stops so let's say without the filter you are gonna need a shutter speed of one second well one stock of neutral density will turn out to two seconds another stop will double that to four seconds and that third stop will double that again to eight seconds well eight seconds is certainly longer than one second but it's still not thirty or a minute or four minutes so if you really get into long exposure photography especially in daylight hours you're gonna need something much denser much darker for that reason I've gone for a 10 stop neutral density filter and if you're really going to this hobby the two companies that do this better than anyone else a leave which I'm using here and format high-tech a decent neutral density filter is not a cheap product she could be spending in excess of 100 pounds of 100 dollars on this thing so it's important to make sure that it can adapt and work on the maximum number of lenses at least those ones that you're going to be using for long exposure photography the trick is is to start with a filter that's big enough to cover your largest lens without vignette in the corners then you can use the filter system holder and various adapter rings to make it fit you smaller lenses most filter systems start with a 100 millimeter filter although if you've got an absolutely massive ultra wide-angle lens for a full frame camera you may need something more specialist like a 150 millimeter filter but what happens if you've got a smaller camera with a smaller sensor like market for thirds or aps-c you main fat bear to get away with a smaller filter system like me and in fact in this video i've been using the li7 5 system that uses smaller 75 by 90 millimeter filters it's smaller it's more affordable it's more portable I've got three filters in my collection I've got my 10 stop big stopper this is what I use for daytime exposures and also just after sunset or just before sunrise I have a less dense three stop neutral density filter here which I can stack on the first one for really bright conditions or I can switch over to this one when the conditions have got a bit darker and I also have a hard graduated filter which as I mentioned in the video it's dark at one end and light at the other the idea being that you can use the dark side to darken skies but use the light side to make sure that the ground or the sea remains untouched now the beauty of using a graduated filter in the filter holder is that you can move it up and down so that that line between dark and light absolutely matches your horizon and you can also rotate it because sometimes when you're photographing say a coastline that almost moves diagonally across the image and if you're graduated filter is completely straight well part of that is going to look too dark and parts going to look too light so you can rotate it to absolutely match now the only other thing to look out for on a graduated filter is that transition between dark and light now on my one here this is a hard grad so it's a very sudden change between dark and light that's ideal when you have a very defined horizon but when you have a slightly fuzzier horizon or you want it to be a bit more discreet you can go for a soft grad filter those ones have got a more gentle transition between dark and light now before you put on that neutral density filter you may need to lock your focus because remember that filters going to make everything darker and not all cameras can focus through it once it's fitted so I'm going to focus my shot and switch this to manual focus okay the conditions are really getting dimmer here and now my cameras telling me that without the filter at 200 ISO and either half second exposure at f/8 once I put this filter on though let's see what happens obviously it's got much darker now and I'm going to have to increase that exposure two seconds four seconds 15 seconds 30 seconds still too underexposed this particular camera can actually go beyond 30 seconds some stop at this point and require you to use full I'm going to go up 40 seconds 50 seconds - no only at this point you can see that it's beginning to get close 60 seconds still not enough and that is the limit of this camera now if you're looking up throwing a Fuji film camera you can keep turning that dial to 1 minutes 2 minutes 4 minutes and so on but for pretty much every other camera you're going to have to go into build mode and do a really long exposure I say a couple of minutes so let's see how that's going to look so I'm in the middle of a two minutes exposure here and even though I've turned off long exposure noise reduction there's still a lot of us standing around with this hobby so what are you gonna do well make friends with other people around you that's always fun how about reading a very interesting book about JPEG photos out of camera only somebody a dreamer now we're coming to the end of this exposure some long exposure photographers are very very precise they say at least I'd be exactly 120 seconds I say well it's a bit like cooking the nice recipe you just keep stirring it add a bit more salt a bit more tomatoes whatever you want now of course the light conditions have got dimmer during that time so I always give it a little bit extra I reckon that's enough so now let's have a look at what we've got so here's our result and as you can see I actually changed the exposure at the last minute I reduced the aperture to at 5.6 and increase the ISO sensitivity to 400 simply because the light was failing so much and as you can see here I've given it 144 seconds that doesn't look too bad let's have a closer look at that water surface and that looks pretty smooth to me not bad the other thing you should definitely do is look at your histograms because these will tell you what your exposure is going to look like the trouble with taking pictures under dim conditions is the screen begins to look very bright and something that's actually underexposed might look fine looking at the histogram tells no lies and you can see here that we've got a tonal range up to in the case of the Blues almost to the full side of this histogram graph that's what we're looking for we're looking for the graph to go at least half way ideally three quarters of the way across I was quite pleased with that normally there's an awful lot of trial and error with long exposure photography speaking my first exposure would be completely overexposed not have to dial it down in some way or completely underexposed and I'd have to dial it back up again but this looks pretty good so what I can now do is work on that actual motion I'd like that seed to look even smoother and the way to do that when the traditions quite still as they are tonight is to use an even longer exposure this one was about two minutes at F 5.6 and 400 ISO I want to give it four minutes I want to give it double the amount of time that means double the amount of light so I can reduce the ISO a stop or reduce the aperture of stop I'm going to reduce the ISO back to 200 give it four minutes and let's see what we've got so now I'm in the middle of a four-minute explosion I really want to have a chat with someone so you'll do okay now I talked about wanting to make that sea look smoother now the interesting thing is is that we're after a very tranquil looking result and the way to get that is with more motion you can do that with a longer exposure or a storm you see the really kind of ironic or contradictory side to long exposure photography is that if that sea was absolutely spoiling in with waves then that would really smooth out very very nicely but let's have a quick chat about other sorts of conditions you should look out for I mentioned earlier they see shooting wide-angle you should position some sort of objects in the foreground well it's dealing with the sea or a river or a waterfall it's great to have a pole or rock or something for that water to splash around it uses a good splash you get all those white marks again they're the things that going to become all nice and blur to become mysterious and steamy in your picture so the really important thing to remember with long exposure photography is that extra dimension of motion look for stuff that's actually moving whether it's the water or the clouds because they're the things that are going to streak or glow in your picture and give it that amazing look okay so right now I'm pretty calm I've got the exposure that I want or at least the best when I'm going to get under these conditions so I'm just mucking about now trying different settings different times beginning to remove the filters because it's getting really dark now and that reminds me to mention something very important it has got quite dark around here suddenly you weren't there to paint your equipment as easily as when you arrived and if you are shooting from a slightly precarious position well it may be quite dangerous in the dark the tide is coming in here if you're shooting by the sea you've really got to watch out for that so bring a torch a flashlight a headlight make sure you don't leave anything behind and make sure we don't fall off any cliffs into the sea that's not a small moon it's a fully armed battle station it's no Wayman it is actually Zuri's if you want to find out more head on over to camera labs comm where you'll see all my sample images and in-depth reviews if you like this video please like share subscribe and if you really like what I do here you can find me a copy using the link below thanks for watching I'll see you next time bye bye delicious you

Channel: Gordon Laing

Views: 827,665

Keywords: Long, Exposure, Photography, Tips, Guide, Tutorial, Workshop, long exposure, neutral density, neutral, density, filter

Id: kcTAXn7LJZ4

Length: 21min 23sec (1283 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 03 2018