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Long exposure photographs


BlueWolf

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No huskies, just something I thought was fun to share!

Few days ago I was on a bridge above a highway with my friend. We where there to watch the lunar eclipse. While we where waiting we had a lot of fun with my tripod and the camera with a shutter of 30 seconds. What does it look like when you have a shutter time of half a minute of the highway?

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Lots of flying lights! See the weird yellow striped line on the far right of the last picture? That's the turn signal of a car apparently :D

It's quite fun to create these. You have no idea what you'll end up with when you start making a photo :)

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And what else can you do with lights and long exposures?

Drawing with light of course!

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No wonder we ended up with 50 pictures like these, and only 5 of them being of the lunar eclipse :D

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that is very cool, how exactally did you go it? i always get to much light in the pictures when i try this

That is one great example why I like DSLRs a lot. You can manual change the settings of it!

In the first two photos there was still a bit of light in the sky so I used the partial automatic mode where I gave the shutter time priority. The camera will automatically adjust the aperture and ISO to compensate this.

Once it got darker the photos got a bit more overexposed since the scanner didn't know I'll be capturing light and just sees a dark road. What I did was just manual change the brightness down to about 2 stops and let the camera calculate the aperture/ISO again. That worked in the 3rd and 4rd picture. After that I just used the complete manual mode. Once you have it set up correctly, you won't need to change it much again.

It's just a matter of lots of trying, after a while you'll know how much all the settings will affect your photo.

Also: Using raw helps a lot to correct the white balance. Colours tend to go funky with low light conditions :)

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Oh right. The moon :D Not that happy with it, it's very hard to capture a darkened moon on a photo! When I used a shutter speed of 10 seconds the moon already blurred out because of the movement of the earth! And of course it's impossible to auto-focus on the moon so I had to do it manual which is nearly impossible to do.

Here are a few photos of the moon that weren't completely rubbish :rolleyes: It begins with the full eclipse of the moon.

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Although you could clearly see the dark and light side of the moon with your own eyes, after a while the contrast was too big for my camera.

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We stood there for about two hours. What did we learn from it?

Moon photographs: Extremely boring!

Long exposure photographs: Extremely fun! :D

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That is one great example why I like DSLRs a lot. You can manual change the settings of it!

In the first two photos there was still a bit of light in the sky so I used the partial automatic mode where I gave the shutter time priority. The camera will automatically adjust the aperture and ISO to compensate this.

Once it got darker the photos got a bit more overexposed since the scanner didn't know I'll be capturing light and just sees a dark road. What I did was just manual change the brightness down to about 2 stops and let the camera calculate the aperture/ISO again. That worked in the 3rd and 4rd picture. After that I just used the complete manual mode. Once you have it set up correctly, you won't need to change it much again.

It's just a matter of lots of trying, after a while you'll know how much all the settings will affect your photo.

Also: Using raw helps a lot to correct the white balance. Colours tend to go funky with low light conditions :)

thank you i will try it

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oh WOW - what camera do u have!?

Just a DSLR on a tripod. It's quite easy to make long exposure shots though, even with point and shoot cameras. The only hard thing is to fix all the weird colours you get out of it which is easier with a DLSR since it can shoot in raw.

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Oh, guess what. I found my first attempt in long exposure shots when I didn't had this camera. Taken on the exact same place. Guess they where worse than I though. You can immediately see what I meant with the colours being weird :D

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Now scroll up again and see the differences. Wow :eek:

Ok, my next goal would be doing this in or after the rain. Think the light in combination with the wet surfaces would look really cool!

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Great photos as always!

Tell me about those shots some more. Blogspot doesn't save any of the exif data. You mentioned they were 30 second exposures, so, what did you have your aperature set to? Were they wide open, or bumped up a bit?

(They're hosted on Wordpress by the way, and they do preserve the EXIF-data, at least for the unresized images. But along with the process of converting from raw to jpg the EXIF-data is sadly lost :( )

The first one, taken at 22:40 (still light in the sky) had a shutter speed of 30s, aperture of 36F, ISO of 100 and the focal length was 55mm. I used the Av mode so everything but the shutter time was pretty much automatically set. Usually I take a shot in semi-automatic and when the result isn't what I was looking for I slowly start to tweak the settings. But this on turned out good right away :)

The forth was taken with my zoom lens. Shutter time 10s, aperture 16F, iso 200 and focal length of 300mm. I *believe* (can't see it for some reason) this was taken with Av as well, but I manually reduced the brightness with two stops on my camera.

The light painting photos are pretty much the same story, though I did manual focus as well.

Now, the moon photos where harder. If I did it with the semi-automatic way the camera tried to do it with a very long shutter time and usually overexpose the photos (since the surroundings where dark). When the moon was mostly dark I had to do everything manually. I tried to keep the shutter time on less than 2 seconds, because otherwise the moon will appear blurry due of the rotation of the Earth (you can see it with your own eyes with 300mm and 10x digital zoom on the live view display!). So short shutter times, hight ISO's and generally wide aperture settings. Hard to find the right setting though, you need to find just the right balance between too much noise and too much blur. Didn't help that the moon's brightness also changed by every minute :rolleyes:

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I've taken a few of these as well, but this is my favourite:

[...]

Believe it or not: Taken at nighttime (it was pitch black!). Exposure time was 30 seconds; and I believe the aperture was wide open.

Ha, I know that! I once did that as well and was quite surprised when it showed me a photo of the scene as if it was a bright sunny day! Photographs like that with a moon in the background look quite cool that way. Especially if you have a subject that casts shadows on the ground. It's like a sunny day, only with light blue light.

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