Take Long Exposures
Use long exposures to take photographs in low light or at night, or to blur light and motion. Low-light conditions often require shutter speeds as slow as one second. To create blurred motion effects or to make night scenes look as bright as day, you might need to keep the shutter open for longer than a minute. Focus on shutter speed and adjust other variables accordingly to get the best long-exposure shots.
Instructions
1. Purchase a sturdy tripod. You'll have to keep the camera absolutely still for long exposures to minimize camera movement and unwanted blurriness. Use a tripod for any shutter speed slower than 1/30th of a second.
2. Open your camera's aperture as wide as it can go if you are shooting in low-light or night conditions and want to minimize the shutter speed. A wide aperture will allow more light to pass through the lens in a shorter amount of time.
3. Close the aperture to a smaller setting if you want to maximize the shutter speed. If you are shooting in bright light but want to blur a waterfall or other motion, for example, shoot with a reduced aperture to allow for a longer exposure without overexposing the image.
4. Note your camera's film speed or digital sensor sensitivity setting. With film cameras, pay attention to the film's ISO number. Films with higher ISO numbers are more sensitive to light and better suited to low-light or night shooting. Sensors on digital cameras often have similar ISO numbers that will indicate the sensor's current sensitivity setting. Adjust this setting according to the conditions, or keep it constant to experiment with shutter speed and aperture.
5. Use a delayed, timed-release shutter if you want to put yourself in the picture. These devices give you a certain amount of time between the moment you press the shutter button and the moment the shutter actually opens. Use this feature to create light paintings with long exposures, in which you hold a candle or flashlight and move it around in an abstract or purposeful pattern. A long exposure will record the light as a single line moving through space.
6. Shoot multiple pictures of the same subject with varied shutter speeds to learn more about long exposures. In some situations, you will not have the opportunity to take a second or third shot. If you do, take advantage of the moment to test different exposure times. Compare the results and determine which aperture, exposure time or combination of the two was most successful.
Tags: shutter speed, long exposures, amount time, low-light night, sensitivity setting, shutter speeds
