Tag: Shutter speed

Get started with long exposure

Posted on August 23, 2022March 21, 2023 by SteveH

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

Long exposure photos can be some of the most remarkable images. But how do you get started with long exposure photography? Let me tell about a recent trip I did to Brittany, France, and give you some simple tips to get started.

I was lucky to be able to visit Tregastel, France during the 49^th 24 hour sailing regatta (see the town’s French website – opens in a new tab). This event hadn’t been held since 2019 due to the COVID pandemic.

As the event takes place over 24 hours there was an ideal opportunity to experiment taking pictures of sailing yachts at night. Additionally, there was a firework display scheduled that evening. A real treat. Also a chance to try some other techniques.

What Is Long Exposure Photography?

Exposure defines the duration that the camera’s sensor is exposed to light. Originally it was the film, now it is the image sensor. A short exposure lets in a little light, useful when in bright sunlight, and has the advantage of freezing movement as the subject is only seen for a fraction of a second by the sensor. Long exposure photography does the opposite and uses a slow shutter speed keeping the sensor exposed to light for a longer period. A long exposure will be defined when we keep the shutter open for a second or longer.

Cameras will calculate the exposure time for you in automatic mode and you will see the time increase as light fades. Many camaeras have a maximum of 30 seconds. In manual, or semi-automatic, mode you can set the time yourself. Finally you can use Bulb mode, where you control the shutter, and it remains open as long as you are pressing the shutter release button.

What does a long exposure create?

As mentioned above long exposures will capture motion as the camera’s sensor is exposed to light for a longer period and therefore a moving object will be seen by several parts of the sensor. A common subject of long exposure landscape photos are rivers and waterfalls. As each drop of water travels across the sensor the water blurs and creates lines of blurred water, almost like clouds. (You can see a long exposure waterfall image on the waterfall blog post) Images of waves at sea do the same thing. Blurring will occur in any part of the scene where there’s motion. This softens the image.

In my case, even if I was by the sea, my target was to capture something moving in the dark. In this case the long exposure lets what little light there is to be captured by the sensor. This is how you can capture stars. Of course, anything that is moving will create the same soft blurred lines that a drop of falling water does. Whether it a boat or a star. So how do you get started with long exposure?

Tips for long exposure photography

Taking photographs with a long exposure time is perfect for capturing motion blur and light trails. But there are some simple rules that must be followed. Above I talked about moving subjects, but unfortunately the same is true if the camera moves. If you shake the camera the tiniest amount when you press the shutter release button everything in the image will have that blurred movement effect and that is rarely the desired effect.

Long exposure rules:

Use a tripod. Helps avoid camera shake.

Use a remote release button. This could be a wire, and remote control or a phone app.

Try various camera setting. There are broad rules, but you really need to set the camera up for your specific environment.

Typical long exposure settings

The 500 rule. For star photography the 500 rule estimates the maximum exposure time you can shoot before stars become blurry or star trails appear. You divide 500 by the focal length of your lens. To capture the sky you would use a wide angle lens, for example, a 18mm lens, then the rule says 500 / 18 = 27.78 seconds. This is just under the 30 second maximum that most cameras allow for a long exposure before going to bulb mode.
For fireworks. Fireworks are generally very bright so easy to see, but moving quickly and appear unpredictably. So start with ISO 200, F/11 and bulb. Press the shutter release button when you hear the firework launch and keep it open until the firework fades. Check and see if you need to modify anything or everything.
Use manual focus. It’s not easy for a camera to automatically focus on a firework which hasn’t even been lit yet. So set the focus to manual. We know the firework will be in the sky so set focus to infinity. In reality it’s not easy for us to do this either. Pointing the camera into the night sky and trying to focus when you can see nothing. A technique that can help is to set the camera to video mode and focus on some visible object, then switch to manual focus and finally back to camera mode.

In my photographs you can see various fireworks which, ultimately, I took with F/7 to let a little more light in. These simple tips should help you get started with long exposure photos.

If you are interested in other long exposure images take a look a the low light blog post.

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Capturing birds in flight

Posted on June 19, 2021December 15, 2022 by SteveH

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

My afternoon introduction to capturing birds in flight tool place at the Étang de la Galiotte. This translates to Galiotte Pond. When you visit you will see that is an understated way of describing a large mass of water in Carrières-sous-Poissy. Capturing birds in flight professionally requires specialized equipment. I need to verify that I am interested enough to make that investment. So with my existing equipment I see about capturing birds in flight.

You can see from the map the lake is quite large. The town of Carrières-sous-Poissy, which translates to Quarries under Poissy, gives a good clue to the origin of the Étang de la Galiotte. The Paris region is made up of layers of sand, limestone, mixed with various amounts of clay. Being by the river Seine transport of the quarried sand was easy. Subsequently the Étang de la Galiotte was filled with river water to make a lake.

The lake is a major feature of the new park du peuple de l’herbe which covers 113 hectares.

Today, the lake and surrounding park are the host of birds, fish and people. There is a small island in the centre to help birds nest and breed. Making it a good site for capturing birds in flight. This protected natural space hosts a village of about 30 floating homes on the southern shore of the lake. There is an active residents association.

The Yvelines region published a detailed study, in French, about steps taken to avoid the risks associated to natural disasters in the region linked to the river, the geology and other potential threats.

Now to my visit. What did I see and how did the afternoon go?

Getting There

First of all if you arrive from Paris take to the train or RER to Poissy. You can walk from the train station at Poissy. It’s a fairly level walk over the main road bridge. It will take 20 minutes, about 1.5km. If you arrive by car, then I suggest you park in the Parking du parc du peuple de l’herbe. There are several bus services which use the road bridge to get to the Poissy station. The town of Poissy has also a project to build a new footbridge (site in French) linking the station to the park.

For the less nimble on their feet, I would recommend sticking to the path that run along the river Seine, rather than those by the lake which end up as a narrow track in the woods.

Bright sunshine and water

Bright sunshine can make photography complicated. On the good side everything is brightly lit, but with that comes shadows. And the contrast can be hard to manage. Add to that water, and to a slightly lesser degree the bright blue sky, and you have bright reflections and dispersed light from the sky and water. This can make the blue sky appear grey, the beautiful water dull and opaque.

Polarization

The solution to this is a polarizing filter. You may will be familiar with polarizing sun glasses. The same filter on your objective will filter out light which is dispersed in all directions. It will leave nicely aligned light rays. The advantage that the filter has over sunglasses is that you can spin the filter to choose exactly which direction the light rays should be. This allows you to choose the blue colour for your sky and optimize the view of the water so you can see the fish etc. Unfortunately my filter was not with me on this trip.

Freezing motion

So I chose to focus on the bird-life. In June the young ducks and geese still look cute and fluffy. They become a natural subject for cute photos. There are also plenty of terns here. They fly quickly over the water’s surface before diving into the water to capture fish. And the fish don’t have much chance as they are so fast. This speed also makes them difficult to photograph.

Some starting steps

Time needed: 30 minutes

Capturing flying birds

Before you go
Empty the memory card, and take the fastest card you have. It might be worth checking what file types you are storing. In general I write RAW and JPEG files to the card. Doing this means writing takes longer and uses more space. You could just save high quality JPEG for this session.
Select objective
Use a zoom, I would say at least 135mm, preferably 210mm, or more
Use auto-focus
Set the auto focus to AI servo. You will not be able to focus manually on the fast moving birds, use the camera’s intelligence o track them in flight
Choose the ISO setting
Consider setting the ISO to 100, or 200, depending on the aperture of your objective. The smaller the aperture the less light will be collected and therefore a higher ISO can help.
Set speed
In order to freeze the movement of a bird, or anything moving rapidly, set the speed to a maximum of 1/800s
Review and modify
After your first series of photos review and adjust the settings. Too dark check the ISO and aperture. Blurred reduce the speed.
Repeat
There will be many missed shots so just keep going

SD Card speeds

There are many sizes of SD cards, but I would suggest 32GB or 64GB. Which gives plenty of room and not a totally unmanageable volumes of photos to sort through when you get home. When the technology was launched it supported a 12.5 MB/s speed. At this speed it would take 2 seconds to write a typical RAW image. Making continuous shooting for a bird in flight impossible. The technology now supports up to 3940MB/s however not all cameras support such speeds, nor do they need them. There are 3 common ways of describing the speed that the card can transfer data.

Look for card with the U3 class. These can support up to 30 MB/s which id ample for video and photo recording. There is more information on the classes on the SD card Association website.

Good luck capturing birds in flight. If you further inspiration try this external website.

Return visit

It’s a great park and I went back in the winter. You can read about it here.

I have other posts about my visits along the River Seine, for example Spring walk along the Seine

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Low light needs a tripod and patience

Posted on May 15, 2021January 25, 2023 by SteveH

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

Low light can bring a great atmosphere to any photo. However, low light needs a tripod and patience if you are to capture the subjects at their best. A tripod because you are going to be taking long exposure photographs and without it there will be movement. The slightest movement will lead to blur. Patience because those long exposures may mean people and pets keep popping into frame at the wrong moment spoiling the perfect shot.

Low light occasions easily present themselves at dusk and dawn and indoors. I am going to a local church to capture some of the atmosphere.

What equipment?

As I said, low light needs a tripod and patience. I have a small Rollei tripod. Some will say I am a bit short of patience but we’ll make do. Traveling light means I will take my Canon and 50mm objective. Why not a zoom you may ask? Really, I choose my 50mm because it has has a large f/1.8 aperture so it can let what little light there is into the camera body. It’s also a great objective for capturing a variety of subjects.

Making sure there was nothing else was happening in the church, and that we had permission, I was allocated 2 hours with the objective of 10 or so images.

The process

Initially take a slow walk around the building looking at everything. Focus on the lighting and shadows. You might not be able to get high up, check out where any choir or organ is situated. But certainly low down angles can give interesting images. If you have seen some of my photos of trees you will know I like looking up, for example. Contrasting shades and colours are good subjects. This can come from lights, or even better the sun. I was fortunate to have sun shining through stained glass windows which brings colour to objects which wouldn’t normally be coloured. Candles are also a source of light but the flames do move so can be tricky on long exposures or when creating an HDR, or bracketed, image.

After reviewing the site, set the ISO to 100. Why? we don’t want the camera software doing clever compensation for the lack of light and increasing the sensor sensitivity leading to noisy pictures. Although I have heard that you can reduce the noise, by merging several images. Not something I have tested yet but when I do I’ll add a link here. Because we have our tripod we can extending the exposure time to avoid any issues . Finally, set the settings to manual or AV, Aperture priority, f/1.8 and off we go.

The results

I wanted to share the images capturing the architecture, the candles and the sunlight. They show that low light needs a tripod and patience. Whether it be waiting for the visitors to move away from the seating, the walkways or the pillars. or coming back to the same chair later in the visit as the sun made its way round to add colour to plan straw chairs.

Finally, if you are out and have no equipment or just out of patience, today’s cameras can do a good job. For example the final candle above. The downside is that it’s a little noisy.

The effect of shutter speeds

Posted on April 7, 2021August 23, 2022 by SteveH

Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes

The effect of shutter speeds on the final picture is very important. The shutter speed , or exposure time, determines how long light falls on to the image sensor or film. It is measured in fractions of seconds for most photographs. The image sensor, or film, is very sensitive to light. Typically you see the time expressed as 1/125 sec. 1 slot of 125 equal slots of one second. As you extend the duration, the number will get smaller, A duration of 5 slots of 125 could be expressed as 5/125s, but you would see it as 1/25s. As with many features of a camera shutter speed is impacted by other settings. Most importantly the ISO. ISO is a definition of the sensitivity of the film or sensor. The higher the number the more sensitive the sensor is.

The brightness of a picture still depend on the light captured and this depends on 2 factors the speed and ISO. They are balanced like a seesaw. If you increase one you can reduce the other.

Of course the aperture, the size of the hole letting light in also has an impact.

These 2 photographs show the same waterfall at 1/10 second and 1/1000 sec. showing the blurred movement of the water or droplets frozen in time.

Let’s get back to the effect of shutter speeds. They are most useful when considering movement. This movement can come from the subject being photographed. In my examples above – the water. But is also can come from you as you move ever so slightly when pressing the button or wobble on a precarious cliff edge, (please don’t!).

The movement gives the image blur as the light from specific point of water, bird, car etc moves and is captured in more than one position. So the slower the shutter speed the more blur. If we want to capture something moving we can have 2 objectives to either:

Capture the subject of the photo as if it was still, so that the light from the subject always falls on the same part of the sensor. This can be done by moving the camera in parallel with the object, Which is not easy. Or it can be done by having a short shutter speed so the light enters the camera before the object has had a chance to move. However the background will appear blurred as we are moving.
Capture the subject to show the movement, by intentionally allowing some blur. To do this we have a longer exposure time, slower shutter speed. So the light moves across the sensor creating blur in the subject; often against a background that hasn’t moved.

Some of my photos are available for purchase on my Adobe Stock store or directly below.

Other landscape photographs can be found here. You can see more waterfalls here and a post about long exposure tips.

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Capturing the beauty of the moment.