Simple TACTICS to NAIL your LONG EXPOSURE Photography

i would have probably made a mistake with this shot and that is the absolute key to getting these long exposure photographs right and making them look special hello there in today's video i've come to the coast and i've come to do some long exposure photography and i'm going to give you five tactics that are almost like a fail safe to allow you to nail your long exposure photographs every single time they will start off really simple and progressively get more difficult but hopefully by the end of it you'll be able to go out and capture some of these stunning attention grabbing long exposure photographs so it's a beautiful day interesting conditions for long exposures very bright at the moment but i'm excited so i would love it if you were to come with me let's go before we get started today though this video is sponsored by squarespace if you need a domain name a website or an online store make your next move with squarespace [Music] so whilst this is definitely not a beginner's guide to long exposure photography i've done videos like that before or you could subscribe to the raw room where that type of thing exists but i wanted to give you a few more advanced details in this video but filters are still a hugely important part of doing landscape photography and you have a few options so one option you have is to use a filter system like this one where the filters then just slide so you pop it onto the front of your lens and then the filters just slide down into it the other option is and i use this for a very long time a screw-in filter so you just have a that's a 10-stop filter as you can't see through it but you just screw that into the front of the lens this is very cheap and still really good and i actually really like the screwing type filters your other option is to get a variable nd filter there's two elements to it so if you can see through that whoa drops in the sand let's try that again so if you see my face through that at the moment if i twist it round it goes darker so you can no longer see through that and that is a nice cheap way to give you a variety of filters in one basically it does sometimes create some strange banding though so it's definitely not the ideal solution i like to use three filters and these three filters will cover pretty much the whole variety of shots you'll want to capture with long exposure landscape photographs and that's a six stop filter a 10 sop filter and i also have a really nice 16 stop filter to give you those really long exposures or long exposures in very bright conditions we might try that a little bit later because it's very bright today you don't need the 16 stop because sometimes you can stack them as well but a 6 a 10 and a 16 is great if you want to do long exposure at night say of a of like the millennium wheel in london you can do that just with out any filters just up your aperture number so you shut that light down with the aperture and you can get a long exposure similarly i do that with waterfalls you can just up the aperture to get a slightly longer exposure or you could have something like a two-stop filter but i just don't bother with that because i very very rarely pull one out of my bag so i no longer carry it with me let's go and take these filters and grab some shots it's not the ideal conditions today though because it was forecast to be a bit cloudy than this clear blue skies are not ideal but we'll see what we can do right so i'm set up for my first shot of the day and undoubtedly the most important thing when we're doing long exposure photography to make sure you're getting the good shots is to develop your workflow now workflow is important in all of landscape photography it's the thing i see people struggling with most is when people struggle with their workflow that they don't enjoy it when i approach a scene like this one here i will first have a look around decide on the composition i want just roughly and then i will get the tripod out i'll then put the camera onto the tripod and then fine-tune my composition essentially now in this case i'm going for a shot that will try to illustrate a little bit the industrial feel of this coastal point where i am today and this i think it must be a water tower or something here sticking out of the sea is what i'm gonna focus on and it's a nice subject for a long exposure that fixed point with the moving sea around it and it's this gentle tide that's really lovely now when you're doing long exposures normally and the best shots will come if the sun is not in the scene either with it behind you or with it in thick cloud at the moment as you can see it's just off to the left of this water tower slightly phallic water tower but there we go it's like it's off to the left so it's not an ideal situation i can't pick the weather anyway i'm compensating for that by putting this nd grad in there and just using it to on a bit of an angle to filter out some of that light coming in from the top left now grads work well with long exposures because you can't really or not easily bracket your images i have tried bracketing this one but it's just not as much fun with long exposures where i just want that one perfect shot so i've got the grad in there so that's the composition set that's the the lighting set the exposure set so well what i then do is get a test exposure now in this case have a correct exposure of about f sixteen and one hundredth of a second i'm doing f16 because i know that's gonna extend my exposure time a bit once i drop in the 10 stop filter the reason i'm using a 10 stop is because very bright still which will give me as an exposure time of around six seconds that will smooth out the water but re leave the detail in the clouds there i then want to focus so make sure i'm in auto focus i just do that usually and then focus on that water tower then lock off that focus that's a really important point of the workflow to lock that focus off because once we drop that filter in a lot of cameras will not be able to focus anymore so it's time to pop the filter on i have these pole pro filters as we've discussed and then slide that in behind the nd grad that then goes dark on the back of the screen and i'm just gonna roll that shutter speed down to here six maybe eight seconds and give that a go what i would normally do is think about covering the back of the camera the viewfinder because if you do a long exposure with a dslr some lights can creep in there so that's another important point of the workflow and the point of developing this workflow is that it's going to be the same you're going to do the same thing over and over and over again so the technical side of what you're doing with your long exposures becomes second nature i've got to turn away from that bright sun the technical aspects become second nature so then all you're left to think about is the composition and the artwork and the story that you're trying to tell i'm gonna shoot that once more and just for added measure i'm just gonna cover the lens from the sun so there's no flare in the image there we go yeah so it's a very very straightforward shot i might have to crop a little bit because i'm starting to get a reflection of the sun off the water which i don't want in the image but there's some interesting tones in there it's not the most complex composition but it will work well telling the story of this industrial coastline the tide's quite far in so i've got it surrounded by that nice smooth water and given the conditions given the fact that i'm shooting almost into the sun there i'm actually really pleased with that and i think if i didn't have that developed workflow that practiced workflow i would have probably made a mistake with this shot and that is the absolute key to getting these long exposure photographs right and making them look special [Music] one of the things that it's important to think about when you're doing long exposures is just a bit wary of the ties before i go on because it's kind of coming in all around me and it's washing over the tripod feet a little bit one of the things that's important to think about is your subject and is that going to work for long exposures and that's the subject and the conditions that you're shooting in now we're smoothing out movements when we do long exposures and most of the time that is going to be in landscape photography at least that's going to be water and the clouds now as you can clearly see there are barely any clouds in the sky there are some wispy little things that are picking up a little bit of detail that immediately makes me think black and white but we've got a few things going for us the grinds here which are just that static focus to the image juxtaposed against the movement of this sea is going to make it quite interesting and the sea is this fascinating brown colour and as the wash comes in it's reflecting all that blue light from above it's looking really interesting the groins then have that seaweed and barnacles which looks lovely so i think if i turn it into a black and white image it could work really well and it just works and tells the story of this what is a very industrial landscape so so well now for the shop very i'm gonna have to speed this up because the water is coming pretty close i'm composed i've got my times i've gone through that workflow we've already talked about and i've got those groins going to the middle of the frame from the bottom right hand corner i think on the camera quite high because i want to keep the majority of the groins below the horizon line i've got the 16 stop filter on it's quite a long exposure three minutes 25 seconds with the current bright conditions i've got the cover on to stop any light going in the back of the camera and my iso 200 just to bring that exposure time down from about six minutes it could turn into something interesting and i think it's making the very best of these conditions which at the moment are no way ideal all right that's now finished exposing so let's go and have a look at that and just in the nick of time i think i think personally that's really nice it's gonna need a little bit of post-processing i put the tripod on a bit of seaweed to stop it sinking into the sand to prevent any movement whoa but i just love it every time i look at a long exposure photograph for the first time when it just appears on the back of the screen it's just so exciting because it's so different to what you see with your own eyes i would also argue that it's still very natural people say that long exposure landscapes are not natural but i think they are they're just showing or capturing a longer amount of time and perceiving the world in a way that our eyes and our minds can't do but that is totally natural it's just over three and a half minutes and personally i find that very exciting not the ideal conditions for this shot but still interesting enough you can only try can't you but i'm happy with that [Music] so the next tactic to grab those beautiful long exposures is to think carefully about your shutter speed using your shutter speed artistically to match your vision is very very important and that will partly be down to filter choice but also due to the lighting conditions and the amount of movement we want to place into an image or the areas we want to or the detail we want to remove now to illustrate this point because it's not ideal conditions for long exposures today i'm going to transport us to the lake district but before we do that i just want to tell you very briefly about the sponsor of today's video which is squarespace as i'm sure you know squarespace is the ideal place to build a website to display your work social media these days is horrible for showing images so controlling that with beautiful big images on your website is a great way to show off your work with squarespace it's so easy to get set up really really quickly you can build a website from scratch with very little technical knowledge put your pictures on there display them beautifully and if you start to grow as a photographer and you start to sell images squarespace will grow with you you can have an online store and it will build and build and build along with you so go to squarespace.com to start your free trial today get your pictures on there set your website up and if you like what you've created use the offer code first man to get 10 off your first purchase right to the leg district [Music] right so i'm here in the lake district on a workshop today and one of the things that i've got to give credit to carl actually who i'm with has found this small tree or branch or whatever it is sticking out of the water and i've been here many times and never noticed that before probably because the water level is just so high today we've had to wade through quite a lot of water to fix where we are one of the things that i'm currently thinking about is we've just got these fantastic conditions at the moment we're doing water in the lake district we've got those mountains in the distance and we're just getting different weather patterns coming across in the scene in front of us then we've got this lovely warm light behind us which is sending a bit of its light onto the little tree then it's just stunning conditions it's that sort of time that i'm always talking about where we have that moment when the weather changes but today it's changing almost every couple of minutes and that's producing a few problems that i'm having to cope with at the moment uh as i'm trying to get a long exposure now one of the challenges with long exposure is you want to decide which elements of the scene in front of you you want to capture which bits you want to capture the movement in now at the moment the clouds are really really interesting so i don't particularly want to capture any of the movement in there or take any of those beautiful details and sharp edges out of that cloud that's also true of the tree there in the water the only thing i really want to take the i'll show the movement in and take some of the detail out of is the water as much as these ripples are quite interesting i want to smooth those out because with the ripples it captures that shadow a little bit and you lose the branch a bit with the water behind it in the ripples by smoothing that water out it creates some nice separation for that tree to be seen in the image really it's a very simplistic image there's just the tree in the foreground surrounded by the water and then the rain and the cloud and everything else behind all illuminated by some of this fantastic light as the wind is gusting around as well so i hope that's not too distracting the way i'm handling that at the moment is i have a six stop filter on the front of the camera that's giving me the the smoothness i could use a two stop or a one stop but i don't have those filters with me so i'm just using what the tools i've got available now one thing i tried was cranking it up to f 22 using iso 50 which gave me about a one second exposure so that gave me the first image and it just smoothed the water out a little bit it kept the clouds sharp i'm just going to shoot again right now but not and there was a lull in the wind as well so everything was sharp but the water wasn't quite as smooth as i'd wanted so what i've now tried is with the six stop filter on cranking the iso to 640 putting it down to f11 that's now giving me a two second exposure which i think that's working much better but with two seconds because the clouds are so far off in the distance they're still sharp i've waited for a nice lull in the wind as well so the tree's not moving so that's going to be sharp as well i'm focusing on the tree camera's not firing it's looking good again just changing all the time so exciting it's just a case when you get into this position once you're composed you just keep on firing now for the composition i've just got the tree down in the left hand side of the frame just nicely roughly on the rule of thirds intersection that then goes up into that beautiful scenic view which i've shot many times before and yeah just a fairly straightforward image once i've figured out those technical aspects which i feel like i've done now that water just looks lovely at two seconds just enough so you can still see a little bit of the detail but enough to isolate that tree now we've got a change in the light again so with that blue sky there you can now see a lot of that blue light reflected in the water as well so i'm going to shoot again just to see if that looks any different in the final image same composition just slight change in the light and that's looking quite good as well let's have a look yeah slightly different the shadows on the water surface getting a nice reflection of that tree as well that just looks beautiful again right on that sort of rule of thirds to the left-hand side so yeah it's just a case of shooting a few things a variety of images with the same composition in this light and i'll pick which one i like back in the drive but turning into a fantastic evening look at some of this light up here absolutely beautiful so the last tactic and definitely the most important one when doing long exposures is to think about why you are actually doing a long exposure it should be an artistic decision and not something you just do because you can i spent the first couple of years when i first started doing long exposure photography just thinking i'm gonna go to a scene and i'm going to make it better just by doing a long exposure and this image here is an example of that i don't think the long exposure here adds anything whatsoever to this picture maybe you think it does it still has that slightly ethereal feel but i think probably it would have been better without a long exposure but used properly and used carefully and with thought the technique can produce a lot it's mainly down to removing that detail like we've already talked about and introducing some of that movement so i want to give you a few examples here right so i'm going to go straight into the computer and this is the first image this is one of my favorites from sun's end this is from a previous long exposure video and very similar to that lake district shot it's just a couple of seconds exposure and what that has done is maintained the detail in the sky here but you can still actually see some of that detail in the water some of that movement and with that those static groins i think the whole image works really well it's all leading towards the middle and there's that nice uh smooth cloud that was there anyway that hasn't become part of that long exposure if we should click onto the next one this was shot at the same location that i've just been to this is a much longer exposure a few minutes maybe about six minutes on a cloudy day and what's happened here is i have purposely removed all of the detail from the water all of the detail from the sky you can still see the horizon a little bit so we can get a little bit of context but then it's just all about these groins and by removing the detail from the water and from the cloud it creates all of this negative space and places it onto that groin area and that is what this image is all about it's that kind of almost like fine art feel that long exposure can give you but it's got to be used intentionally let's have a look at another one this is a good example of where it works well for cityscapes and again this is quite a long exposure about five minutes i think and it smoothed the clouds out it smoothed that river out in newcastle and then it's because we've removed detail from those areas the image is no longer about the sky or the water so much it's all about the detail of the shadow and the shape of this bridge and the details of the city that was the story i wanted to tell so removing that detail from the sky and from the river allowed me to tell that story a little bit better and then it just looks nice and smooth and interesting as well let's have a look at one more now this is a good example of where long exposure can be very useful if shot at sunset now the sun is off to the right hand side this is a scene in mull you can also see the video i've shot due to when i made this picture but this is where if you do a long exposure for a few minutes if there's only one little patch of colour in the sky if you expose for a few minutes and the clouds move across your scene picking up all that colour it will end up with a more colorful image and that was the case here so the this this cloud here has sort of moved across and you can see little dots of color all over the top of the image and it's made it a more colorful image and again we've smoothed out that water just a little bit smoothed out those clouds but there's still some detail in there let's have a look how long that one was yeah that's still 270 seconds so it's still quite a long exposure but this must have been kind of been much movement on much wind it's just created that nice ethereal image that's worked well and wouldn't have worked anywhere near as well if it wasn't a long exposure right here's an example where there isn't any sea this is just purely smoothing out the clouds so it was quite an early it was around midday this one so those clouds were white and fluffy and if i'd done it with that kind of image i think it would have distracted from this amazing sycamore tree the sycamore gap very famous at hadrian's wall and it's this lovely shape and that interesting tree in that image and by removing the detail from the sky from the cloud but remain having a little bit of texture in there still with these lines across we've still got that tree looking really nice that's another thing we can do i don't mind actually the little bit of movement in the tree that you can see there because you still get that nice shape and the nice detail in the trunk and things so again thinking about that artistically at the time to place more emphasis onto that tree and here's another example this is from uh this is the longest exposure i've ever taken it was about nine minutes now i was just doing that as a little bit of an experiment i did a video during this one as well but you can see here the effects that it has on the water it was a little bit choppy but by extending that exposure time to around six minutes it totally smooths out water now there wasn't much wind so thankfully i've still got some nice detail in the clouds they just look wispy and delightful and this image has created that total serene ethereal feel that long exposures create i love the shadow of the of the island as well the mountains in the distance and if we'd had a long if it hadn't been a long exposure there would have been detail in the water and it would have drawn attention away from this island away from those mountains and then the sky just looks pretty still with some cloud detail in there so all the time when you're doing long exposures thinking about the the artistic side of things it's not just a technical exercise it need if it's a technique that we have in our toolbox that we should use at the right time but that doesn't mean you shouldn't experiment if you're not sure take one without the filters then put the filter in and take a long exposure and you can compare and learn as you go through and it's fun it's fun to play with and like i said before when you see it on back of the screen for the first time it's just it's really exciting and then not there's not as many people doing long exposures usually takes a photographer not just someone on instagram and when you show them they do grab attention and people seem to really love them so i hope you've enjoyed this video i know it's been long if you've made it through this far thank you very much and i hope you can take some of the tips away if you want to learn more you can go and subscribe to the raw room there's the landscape photography master class which includes a full chapter on how to do long exposure photography so you can get seven day free trial for that i'll put a link down below and i'll see you on another one very very soon i'm adam this is first man photography [Music] out [Music] you

Channel: First Man Photography

Views: 102,473

Keywords: landscape photography, long exposure photography, landscape photography vlog, landscape photography tutorial, landscape photography tips, photography, photography tutorial, advanced photography techniques, advanced photography, long exposure, photo hacks, how to use nd filters, nd filter photography, nature photography, outdoor photography, landscape photographer, polar pro summit, long exposure photography tutorial, photo ideas, first man photography

Id: bHurQ2pj7H4

Length: 27min 53sec (1673 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 06 2020