Long exposure photography is most often associated with nighttime images or those captured around sunrise and sunset. When there’s less light available, the shutter needs to be kept open for longer exposure times. Shooting at these times of day, long exposures are necessary in order to record the scene. Sometimes however, it’s desirable to have a long exposure during the daylight, with scenes featuring water being particular favorites for this kind of photography. The problem is that during the day there is usually an abundance of light, so how are you to use long exposure at times when the conditions don’t require them?
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There are a few different methods we can approach this. Probably the easiest for most photographs, and one that doesn’t require any investments in gear, is illustrated in the photograph below taken at Emerald Peak waterfall, in a Taiwanese national park. When I photographed this, it was a bright sunny day. To make things more difficult, I shot it at 10.45am in the middle of summer, which is nowhere near dark enough for nighttime. It’s not a really long exposure – only 0.8 seconds – but it is long enough to achieve the same effect. The location offered a bit of tree canopy shelter from the sun which meant slightly longer exposure times. It was definitely light enough though for handheld photography, so the tree cover alone was not enough. I dialed in an ISO of 100 and selected f16 for my aperture. To give it some final help in lengthening my exposure times, I also used a polarizing filter which eats up a couple of stops of light. All of these factors came together to allow the longer exposure.
While 0.8 second is a longer exposure than usually, it’s still not a true long exposure. To go longer, you need some additional equipment, in the form of neutral density (ND) filters. An ND filter is simply a neutrally tinted (meaning it won’t affect the color balance of the scene) dark filter that you attach to the lens. They serve to cut down the light entering the lens, meaning that exposure times need to be lengthened to achieve the correct exposure. The following picture is one from last weekend. This was taken at 12.50pm on a very bright summer’s day. This is probably the worst time of all for most kinds of outdoor photography, however in this case I had no choice – a client wanted a particular location scouted last weekend and it had to be at low tide, which unfortunately occurred at lunchtime. For the photograph below, I’ve used the polarizer once again, but I’ve also stacked a Cokin ND8 neutral gray filter on. This is not a true neutral density filter, but for my purposes here was close enough. This combination enabled an exposure time of 3.2 seconds at an aperture of f22 and ISO100.
3.2 seconds is getting longer, but sometimes you want to go even longer. This being the case, you need to pull out the big guns and that’s what I did for the next photograph (a toned version of which opens this post). I used a B+W 110 ND filter for this which cuts a phenomenal 10 stops of light, enabling much longer exposure times. The image here had an exposure time of 20 seconds but I also added almost a stop of exposure in Lightroom. I did shoot longer exposures – up to 100 seconds – but the wind was a little too strong and there’s some slight movement of the tripod that’s noticeable in exposures longer than about 20-30 seconds.
It goes without saying you need a sturdy tripod, some kind of remote shutter release and a lot of patience for this kind of photography. When using something as strong as a 10 stop ND filter at small apertures, it’s going to be practically impossible for your camera’s autofocus to work, so I’d advise focusing before attaching the filter. Switch off the AF so that your focus point remains locked and then attach the filter. Working out exposures times can be done by using a table or some math, or simply trial and error. With digital you can immediately see the results on the screen, so check the exposure histogram and adjust as necessary. For times over 30 seconds (or whatever the longest programmed time is on your camera), you’ll need to use the B setting and have some kind of timer. I used the stopwatch on my Android phone but the screen wasn’t easy to see in the bright light, so I ended up just roughly counting in my head for the longer ones. If you’re doing a 100 second exposure, a second or two out is not likely to be a problem. Finally, watch out for vignetting on wide angle lenses. I find around 24mm to be a good starting point. If I go all the way out to 17mm on my 5D Mark II I get some noticeable vignetting.
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