Long Exposure Photography

Long exposure photography can lend itself to a lot of fun effects. Images of traffic zooming by, leaving neon trails from headlights and brakelights, as well as those neat images of people drawing on the wall with a laser pointer, are all made possible by forcing the camera to keep its shutter open for an extended period.

As with any style, long exposure photography requires you to know what you're doing, and have an image in your mind of what kind of photograph you are looking to create. Photography rarely allows for the free-form style of artwork that sketching or doodling can create. The medium has a tendency to be unforgiving. In the days of film, you can imagine that experimentation was difficult and expensive. Using today's technology, being the digital camera and the computer, not only do you have unlimited 'film', but you can immediately preview your work. If your computer is nearby, you can even see the full image, and then get back to shooting, in very little time. With such quick turnaround, many photographers find they are able to see what they like or dislike about a shoot, and still have time to get another shot or two of the subject before the shot is lost: either the subject has moved, left, or the sun has set.

Images like this are possible with experimenting through long exposure photography. At first glance, it may not seem interesting, and the size constraints of this page may make the details hard to see. Using a 5-second shutter speed, this sunset shot of a forest makes the day seem brighter and the light more ambient than it truly was. Another effect is that, while the tree trunks and the groundcover remain crisp and sharp, many of the leaves visible, especially those in the foreground, are blurred because of motion. The wind was blowing the leaves, moving them slightly, but obviously not affecting the trees themselves. This gives the picture a sense of motion, with a few solid, vertical lines.

By taking advantage of the long exposure, I was able to get this very dramatic shot. All I did was zoom in as the shutter was open. Woosh!

And this is what happens when you are standing on the same plank of wood that the tripod is standing on, and decide to move during a 10second shot.

While the shutter is open, it is absorbing more and more light. The evening was dim, but not dim enough for a 10-second shot of some clouds passing over. What you can see are the shadowy portions of the trees. Everything else is blown out by overexposure.

This is one of my favorites. It is subtle, but I like the effect. The focus is on the two trees in the distance, through the leaves of the tree in the foreground. I wanted the trees in the back to really stand out, and to make the foreground fade a bit, so I put the exposure to 10 seconds. Not only do I get a soft-focus effect from the foreground being simply out of focus range, but the movement of the smaller limbs and leaves makes the focal point stand out all the more for being so clear. You can almost imagine someone peeking out from behind that – wait, did you see that?

Exposure done Wrong

It's often easy to talk about different styles of photography, or methods of taking a picture, when you're using the one-out-of-a-dozen images that turned out exactly the way you wanted.

To really show what is happening when you snap that shot, I wanted to share a couple images that did not quite 'work'.



This is from the same series of photographs as the waterfall image from last time. Like I said then, a long exposure shot requires low level light in order to keep from washing out the image. This is what happens when the sun comes out from between the clouds just as you take the photograph. The shutter stayed open for nearly a full second, soaking up sunshine and causing this blowout glare. Those places that are pure white are lost - there is nothing you can do in post production to rescue those parts of the image unless you want to start redrawing pixels and trying to create texture where there no longer is any. At that point, you may as well have started drawing the image from scratch. Much better to simply wait for more clouds, or closer to sundown.


The bee may have been holding still, but this butterfly was not. Unfortunately, rather than just take the shot and wind up with an image of a butterfly blurring away from the flower, I wound up trying to move the camera with the butterfly. I wasn't able to keep up, and my shutter speed wasn't fast enough to freeze things, so the whole image smeared into a worthless 'zoom' picture. It's a problem of having not quite decided what image I wanted before setting up the shot, and not being prepared to adjust to a suddenly moody subject. Butterflies are primadonnas. Now you know.


Another problem with choosing your subjects and lighting is that ever demonized 'red-eye' effect. It happens in people because you're literally flashing light off the back of the eyeball just as you snap the shot. Due to the red blood vessels surrounding the inside of the eye, you get that horrific crimson glare. In things that lack red blood, you get this crazy white-eye effect. It happens with frogs, fish, and certain politicians. If I could have trusted my hand to be steady enough, and the frog to hold still, I would have taken a slightly longer exposure to get a natural-light shot. As it was, it was getting dark and I had no convenient rocks on which to steady the camera.

Now, though, I've acquired a new tripod and a remote, by which I can take shots and never disturb the camera. That should allow some very interesting photos!


Of course, equipment does not guarantee that you'll get the shot you're looking for, if you haven't done your homework...

The Long and the Short of It

Preparations continue for the National Novel Writing Month. If you’re curious to watch my progress or learn more about the event, here is the link to my NaNoWriMo page.

http://www.nanowrimo.org/eng/user/404901

For this novel project (that was a pun), I plan on using photographs I’ll be taking through the month of October as inspiration and illustrations for different sections. I’ll probably do quite a bit of photomanipulation to them, adding increasingly less subtle adjustments to them in order to express the ‘fantasy’ side of the genre I’ve picked for the novel. I still have no outline, no plans, and barely a setting. That means that I will be discovering this story as I write it.

In the meantime, let me show you some neat effects that can be done with a camera before you need to take the photograph to post-production. As a segue, here is the image I’ve chosen to use as the cover to this upcoming novel.

Obviously there have been some touchups, like the text and the blur around it, and there is even a soft blur and glow to the whole image. We’ll cover how to do that at some other time. The original photograph has its own magical appeal, however, and isn’t something that can easily be done with a typical point-and-shoot camera.

Long-exposure photography is something I would like to get into more, in the future, and so I have invested in a digital remote for my d60. This will allow me to release the shutter without touching the camera, further minimizing the amount of shake that may blur or smear the image. For this waterfall, however, I was lucky enough that a steady rock and holding my breath were sufficient to keep the stones and grasses crisp and clear while the water blurred into a silk sheet.

This style of photography is used a lot for scenic waterfalls, or shots of old houses (to let the moving clouds in the background blur into obscurity), but it takes a lot of work. You have to know the spot, you have to know the time of day, and you have to be able to hold still for multiple seconds while the shutter is open. The reason that the time of day is important is because, while your shutter is open, it is absorbing more and more light. If it is a nice, sunny day, and you leave your shutter open for up to a second, then you will see nothing but glare. The image will be almost entirely white. The best times for images like this are early morning, late evening, or just before/after/during a rain shower. Obviously the rain can be dangerous to your equipment, and potentially uncomfortable, so the gloaming times of the day are perfect for photographers looking to get the long exposure image like this.

On the other hand, a dark day is very poor if you are trying to take a photograph of something in movement. To freeze the image, and reduce the amount of smearing (the opposite of what we wanted with the waterfall), you need to have a fast shutter speed. The faster the shutter speed, the less movement you will see. The best examples of this are hummingbirds and bumblebees in flight – but frozen. It looks as though they simply stopped moving in midair. For this image, I believe I may have gotten lucky and the bee actually stopped for the millisecond my shutter was open. Perhaps it was posing for me? Or just too busy eating.

A dark day would have given me a dim, greyed out image. With the shutter only open for a split part of a second, there isn’t much time for light to hit the sensor. If the day is bright, and the sun is direct, then the image will be perfectly fine, and the color will be vibrant and the details sharp. A cloud overhead will destroy the effect. A setting sun will force you to consider taking the image to post production and lightening it up, but you can never fully recover an image that is soaked in shadows.

Next week, I’ll show you some examples of how badly things can go with both a long exposure and a very short exposure. It always seems easy until you see that only one out of two dozen photographs were acceptable.

Thank goodness for an 8gb memory card.

Punctuation Practice

With the coming of the controversial movie, “Blindness”, based on the novel of the same name by José Saramago, we will turn our attention towards the part of written language that only seems to get attention when it is misused.

No, not spelling.

Punctuation.

Saramago’s novel is actually somewhat famous for being one of the few published pieces of literature that intentionally abuses punctuation. Leaving out commas is one thing, as commas and other parenthetical marks are often a matter of opinion rather than concrete law, but Saramago’s “Blindness” actually removes quotation marks, periods, and many other literary clues that make communication flow from author to reader. There are passages of dialogue that are missing the quotation marks, leaving the reader uncertain as to who is talking. There are sentences that go on for a full page or more. Paragraphs continue unabated. Perhaps these are stylistic choices made with the intention of putting the reader in a state of discomfort, or unease, or leaving them confused like the characters in the book may be. However, other authors of other books have taken this similar challenge and mastered the concept without completely ignoring proper modes of written communication. The major sticking point is the inconsistency, making it appear that Saramago simply did not know how to write, and the publishers assumed it was avante garde, and everyone just went with it.

Rather than turn to a lesson on how to properly use such punctuation as the comma, exclamation point, question mark, or quotation marks, I would instead like to play a little while in the sandbox of punctuation you may not see every day.

For instance, the Irony Mark (؟). Also known as a ‘snark’ or a ‘zing’, it’s to be used to indicate that a sentence should be understood at a second level. Originally proposed by the French poet Alcanter de Brahm (aka Marcel Bernhardt), it was picked up in 1966 by Hervé Bazin for his book Plumons l’Oiseau. Bazin had a few other suggestions for additional marks, such as the doubt, certitude, acclimation, authority, indignation, and love point. Personally, I think Bazin has quietly succeeded with at least the final suggestion. After all, perhaps you have written something similar to in your own text messages or emails to friends and loved ones. How different is his proposal ( ) to our own usage (<3)?

The interrobang (‽) is a superimposition of two familiar marks, the question and exclamation, or the interrogative mark and the bang. More and more frequently, the same effect is being seen in established literature and common usage when the two marks are used simultaneously. Eg: “How could you do such a thing?!” The order in which they appear has no consistent bearing on the meaning, or emphasis, of the sentence preceding them, but many users agree that the interrogative should appear first to make certain that the question is apparent. Emphasizing the tone and urgency of a sentence is not aided by repetition of the characters, despite common and informal usage today. “What have you done?!?!?!” Despite the increasing frequency of the combination, it should be noted that the use of both-at-once predates the invention of the interrobang. Invented in 1962 by Martin K Speckter, the interrobang lived for almost a full decade, making its way onto typewriters and into dictionaries. After that, the fad ended and the two characters were again divided to be only set together in dialogue, informal writing, or chess moves.

A mark that is used, but for a sound only heard in African languages, is the click. Yes, there is a symbol for the click. Often, especially in names, an exclamation point will suffice, but this is usually only for sounds that fall immediately before a soft consonant, like an “n” or “m”. !Mbobi is a difficult name for non-native speakers to pronounce, but such names can be a source of pride for people who work in foreign lands but are unwilling to make drastic concessions to the english speakers they interact with. The actual palato-alveolar click, done with the tongue creating a pocket of air against the roof off the mouth, and then, with a velaric ingressive airstream mechanism, plosively released. The symbol for such is the ǂ, followed or preceded by a consonant indicating the dictation of the sound. I recommend a lot of practice.