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Long exposure photography examples. Long exposure photography

The Ferris wheel at night, with long exposures, looks very impressive. To capture it you will need a wide-angle lens. Set up your camera on a tripod, frame your shot, and shoot. Since we want the maximum area of the frame to be in focus, it is worth setting the aperture within f/11-f/32. When photographing at night, such an aperture will require a slow shutter speed. You will have to work in manual mode, or shutter priority mode. The shutter speed should be set to a value from 1 to 30 seconds. It is best to shoot using a timer, cable release or remote control remote control. The result should be a shot with a dark sky, a clear center of the wheel, and blurry wheel lights.

Photographing star trails

By shooting at slow shutter speeds, you can achieve beautiful effects that show the movement of stars across the sky. Such photos can be made much more beautiful with trees and other interesting foreground objects. For this type of shooting, you need to set the camera's shutter speed to "Bulb" mode and set the aperture to f/2.8 - F/4 for optimal results. Use your remote control to activate the shutter button. ISO sensitivity should be set to its minimum value in order for photos to be as sharp and grain-free as possible. After the desired period of time has passed, press the button on the remote control again, thereby completing the process of creating a photo. In this case, at least 15 minutes should pass, or even better, it should be several hours.

Headlight blur

Shooting at long shutter speeds creates a stunning effect from the headlights. Photographing cars is a great way to learn how to work with long shutter speeds in particular, and manual modes in general. For such shooting, you will definitely need a tripod, since any hand shake will lead to blurry frame. As far as settings are concerned, it is advisable to set the aperture to around f/16, thus most of The frame will be in focus and will be clear. Then set the shutter speed. The longer the shutter speed you set, the longer the lines from the headlights you will get.

Sea waves blur

When photographing the sea coast with a long shutter speed, you will get a beautiful effect of a blurry wave that will look like fog. For this type of work, it is best to photograph in the last hour before sunset. For this work you will also need a tripod. For photography, it is recommended to use a wide-angle lens with the smallest aperture and focus at infinity. Turn the camera mode dial to manual mode, and use a slow shutter speed (5-30 seconds). The longer the exposure, the more sea water will look like fog. To avoid even the slightest blur, use a remote control, cable release or timer.

Exposure determination

The settings used during night operation will depend on certain factors. If, despite the night time, there is light around, then the shutter speed can be set lower, or the aperture can be closed larger. In any case, to create blur effects, it is recommended to set the shutter speed to about 1/2 second, which means using a tripod is mandatory for a high-quality result. If you have little experience with night photography, then play with the settings and try different values for the aperture and shutter speed.

When photographing at long exposures, an important factor in choosing a setting should be understanding what effect you want to achieve. It is necessary to use such endurance, which would be sufficient to achieve one or another result. If the shutter speed is too slow at a wide aperture, the photo may end up being overexposed and image detail will be lost. When attempting to create a headlight trail, the shutter must be open for at least 1 second. Use shutter priority mode and, starting with a shutter speed of one second, observe what results are achieved. Then increase the shutter speed to two seconds, and so on, changing either the aperture value or the shutter speed value. Once you do beautiful photo, you will understand it immediately.

In addition to your DSLR or mirrorless camera, you will need a tripod; without one, there is practically nothing you can do for night photography. A tripod will allow you to stabilize the camera, making it stable, and this will prevent blurry pictures. To practice night photography, your camera must have the ability to manually set the shutter speed and aperture.

Long exposure photography is not a new format, but photographs taken with such parameters look quite impressive. And most importantly, if you are a beginner, then it’s easy. All you need in terms of equipment is: a camera, a tripod, a wide-angle lens (even a standard 18-55 lens will do) and an ND filter (neutral density filters)

ND filters are designed to diffuse light that enters in front of the lens.

1. Create a gentle movement of water or show where it is moving

One of the most popular uses of long shutter speeds is to smooth out water or make it look frozen. You can shoot such scenes on the sea, lake or rivers. These photographs themselves are more about the sky, rocks and environment.

Another way to shoot water is to set a fairly short shutter speed of 1-3 seconds, this way you will see the movement of the water and, as it were, stop it in the photo. People also love to photograph waterfalls with this effect.

2. Blurry clouds

Architecture is a very popular subject for long exposure photography, this way you can blur the clouds and make your subject seem timeless. With the help of a blurry trail of clouds, you can highlight the main subject of shooting, creating, as it were, guides.

3. Clear the photographed area of people and cars

If you have always wanted to rent interesting place in the city, but people were bothering you, now you can do it using a filter on the lens and a long shutter speed. If there is a small flow of people in this place, then they will definitely be removed from the photo. If there is a lot of traffic of people and cars, it will turn them into ghosts :)

Photo of a street with a shutter speed of 10 minutes

4. One way to photograph popular places differently? than other photographers.

Every city has an iconic place that everyone tries to photograph, and if you have an ND filter and a tripod, then you can take that special photo.

5. Show time in landscape photos.

When do you shoot with long exposures? people think you are photographing time. Look for something special in the landscapes, for example these trees, people may think that you photographed them drying up.

6. Surreal landscape

With long exposures you can create surreal landscapes

7. Night photography

Since you love photography, using a long shutter speed allows you to continue shooting even at night! All you need is to set up your camera correctly and have good support (better, of course, a tripod).

Like these ones simple tips, which will help you try yourself in other genres.

Greetings to all amateur photographers! Today, in the “Photography Theory” section, we will take a closer look at one of the components of exposure, namely shutter speed, find out what it can be, what it affects in photography, and what effects can be achieved if you adjust the settings correctly.

We would also like to draw your attention to the fact that the material contained below may be useful when creating photos for the project “Photo Association “Movement”.

So, let's start studying.

The camera shutter is like a curtain that opens to allow light exposure to begin, and then closes to complete it. As a consequence, the photograph does not reflect a moment, but a certain interval of time. The term used to describe this interval is "excerpt"(exposure duration).

The shutter speed is calculated in fractions of a second: for example, 1/30 s, 1/60 s, 1/125 s, 1/250 s. Only the denominator is displayed on the screen of many cameras - “60”, “125”, “250”. Often, long exposures are displayed as a number with quotation marks – 0”8, 2”5. There is also a standard range of shutter speeds. 1 , 1/ 2, 1/ 4, 1/8, 1/15, 1/30, 1/60, 1/125, 1/250, 1/500, 1/1000, 1/2000, 1/4000 s . For the longest shutter speeds, the camera has a "Bulb" setting - the shutter is open as long as the shutter button is pressed.

Short(1/250 sec and shorter) the shutter speed seems to “freeze” any movement, and the photo turns out clear, without the slightest blur.

In general, a shutter speed of about 1/250 - 1/500 is sufficient to capture human movement, but for close or extremely fast subjects, 1/1000 or 1/4000 of a second may be required.

Fast moving cars or animals: 1/1000 s;

Waves: 1/250 sec.

Long shutter speed makes it possible to properly expose the frame, especially when there is insufficient lighting - at dusk, at night. It also allows you to shoot many interesting stories. Since with a long shutter speed there is a possibility of “shaking” and blurring, it is advisable to use stabilization if the camera or lens has it. In such cases, a tripod will be a good helper. Stabilization should be turned off when mounting the camera on a tripod.

Depending on what shutter speed we use when shooting, short or long, we can get completely different effects in the photo.

Whenever there are moving objects in the frame, the choice of shutter speed determines whether the motion will be frozen or cause blur. However, it is not possible to change the shutter speed itself without affecting the exposure or image quality.

1. When reducing shutter speed you need:

Increase ISO speed (possible by-effect: visual noise in the photo)

Close the aperture (side effect: depth of field may decrease)

2. When increasing shutter speed you need:

Reduce ISO (side effect: you can't do without a tripod)

Open the aperture wider (side effect: decreased sharpness)

It’s very good when the camera has a bulb mode. In this mode, you can manually set the time for which the shutter will be open. The manual shutter mode will be useful when photographing celestial objects at night, in scientific photography, when a process is filmed slow in time. If you shoot, for example, a night landscape with a starry sky on a moonless night with a shutter speed of several hours (at a medium aperture value), then the image will show traces of the rotation of the stars, an arc relative to the North Star. But again, be aware of noise in digital cameras, especially at high ISO settings.

To get the correct exposure in a photo, you need to take all this into account and select the values of three values (ISO, aperture, shutter speed) depending on each specific scene and situation.

What should be the endurance for different situations? Let's look at examples.

Five classic camera shutter speeds:

1. Freeze the motion, or shoot 1/250 s or faster.

The faster the subject moves, the shorter the shutter speed should be. For example:

Fast moving cars or animals: 1/1000 s;

Mountain bikes or running people: 1/500 sec;

Waves: 1/250 sec.

It should be remembered that individual parts of the object can move very quickly. A striking example similar to a helicopter. The fuselage itself can be frozen at a shutter speed of 1/250, but for the blades even 1/2000 may not be enough. Or, for example, when photographing a girl fluttering her hair in order to freeze the ends of her hair, it is also necessary to use shutter speeds of the order of 1/1000 or even less, while the model itself is moving relatively slowly.

Using a fast shutter speed helps to get a fairly balanced shot, but makes the photo too static. Any movement in the frame will be frozen.

You can fix this by trying to slightly change the camera's tilt to get a more dynamic photo composition. But the best option– use the shooting technique with wiring, which will be discussed later.

2. Shooting with wiring.

Shooting with “wiring” is a technique that gives the effect of movement in the picture, while the object turns out sharp against a blurry background.

And here endurance plays a very important role. It should be in the range from 1/15 to 1/250 s. If you shoot at faster shutter speeds, 1/500-1/1000, the effect of movement will decrease or disappear altogether. Because a short shutter speed will make the background and the subject equally sharp. Compare these two photos.

For example, some quantities that photographers most often use:

Fast moving cars, motorcycles or birds: 1/125 sec;

Mountain bikes close to camera: 1/60 sec;

Mountain bikes, animal movement or human work: 1/30 sec.

3. Creative Blur - Shutter speed 1/15s to 1s.

For example, fast flowing waterfall: 1/8 s; people walking near the shooting point; waves; slow water movement: 1/4 sec.

The set shutter speed also affects the transmission of weather in the image. You can convey rain in solid lines using shutter speeds of 1/4 s or longer. If you want to “freeze”, stop individual snowflakes in flight, set the shutter speed to 1/125 s.

Adding flash to a blur photo allows you to freeze certain subjects, meaning you can move the camera around for an artistic effect.

A long shutter speed combined with the movement of a small constant light source allows you to add a graffiti effect to the image.

4. Photograph with shutter speed from 1 s to 30 s.

There are processes that take a long time, and a shutter speed of up to 1 second is no longer enough. These processes differ not only in time, they differ in perception. At shutter speeds from 1 to 30 seconds, all processes that occur quickly in the frame are erased, leaving only static... soft static. There is a feeling that the world has frozen. The movement disappears again. Only if at shutter speeds of 1/1000 the movement disappears, but a person sees an object that could move, then at a 30 second shutter speed there is no movement left. This effect can only be achieved if you use a tripod.

Many novice photographers think that the secret good photos in a short excerpt. The most literate know that it should be no less than one divided by the focal length of the lens with which you are shooting. But in fact, there are a number of plots and technical solutions, which allow you to create interesting and unusual pictures using long shutter speeds. As an underwater and cave photographer, I quite often have to work in low light conditions, and this forces me to get out in one way or another and get an image when it is simply impossible to capture the moment with a camera. That's why I have a wide arsenal of techniques to shoot where most people can't shoot. And this gives me a certain professional advantage.

Wiring

The simplest and most obvious use of long exposures taught in photography school is wiring. When you have an object that is moving in the frame, you aim at it and start moving the camera without changing the position of that object in the viewfinder. So you can shoot wildlife, a sport where something moves past you, and you “see it off.” This technique is used when you do not have the opportunity to get close to the subject in order to freeze it with a flash, and there is no way to set a fast enough shutter speed so that the subject is not blurred, or, on the contrary, you need to enhance the effect of movement - then set a longer shutter speed, about ¼ or 1 second and try to make the wiring. This is a technically quite complex technique that requires training. The easiest way to practice is by going outside and filming cars passing by. Then, after some time, you will learn to move the camera at such a speed that it matches the linear speed of the car, and the object remains sharp, and the entire the world was blurred beyond recognition. In this way, you can shoot animals to show the speed of movement and the dynamics of a moving object.

Aperture – f/13
Shutter speed – 1/4, ISO 400
Focal length – 16 mm
Camera – Nikon D3S

For example: we filmed dolphins. The mother and calf swam very quickly, and flashes could not be used, as the animals were afraid of them. The lighting was too low to allow a fast shutter speed. So I increased the shutter speed to ¼ and captured the passing animals. Thus, I not only filmed the dolphins, but also showed the dynamics of their movement. Although there is a tendency to shoot at shutter speeds as fast as possible, and cameras are improving in this direction, sweeping remains one of the favorite techniques of sports and wildlife photographers, and allows for more varied and dynamic images.

A little more complicated is the technique of combining wiring with a flash. You set the flash timing to the rear curtain, make a flash, and the flash will record the moment the movement ends - you will have a sharp frozen image of the last phase of the movement, while all previous ones will be underexposed and blurred. Such shots are very dynamic.

Aperture – f/13
Shutter speed – 1/4, ISO 200
Focal length – 16 mm
Camera – Nikon D3S
Lens – AF Fisheye-NIKKOR 16mm f/2.8D

For example, in this shot with a dolphin, thanks to the flash, the baby got a sharp, happy face. And around him, with a long shutter speed, everything moves, there is a feeling of the irrepressible dolphin life, the dolphin world, in which everything happens very quickly.

Static camera

The next technique is to use a long shutter speed when the camera is fixed, but the objects in the frame move and blur. Typical objects of such photography are water: sea surf or waves running across the sea, jets of a fountain or waterfall, which are smeared and give the feeling of flow. For example, here's the story:

Aperture – f/8
Shutter speed – 1/10, ISO 200
Focal length – 24 mm
Camera – Nikon Df

Aperture – f/11
Shutter speed – 2.5, ISO 100
Focal length – 35 mm
Camera – Nikon D4S
Lens – AF-S NIKKOR 35mm f/1.4G

It could be snow or rain, or cars leaving trails of lights. This is the Government House of Azerbaijan, known as the House of a Thousand Rooms. If I had taken this photo of Baku at night at a short shutter speed (which the camera allowed), then in the foreground I would have had a lot of cars that would have distracted from the main subject. But on a long exposure they are not there - they disappeared, leaving only the tracks of side lights and brake lights. This is how they photograph cities at night and mountain serpentines, and they look very impressive. This way you can control the influence of a moving object on the composition of the frame: change it, make it minimal or remove it altogether.

Weak light source

Next case: insufficient lighting and stationary objects. Instead of struggling and inventing ways to light them, you just need to put the camera on a tripod, open the shutter and expose the frame the way you need. This simple method allows you to turn a banal story into an interesting and unusual shot that will look attractive and fresh.

For example, this photo of the Blue Lake dive center was taken at night with a shutter speed of 30 seconds. It doesn't look like night time due to the long exposure, but it still looks interesting with unusual colors.

Aperture – f/7.1
Shutter speed – 30, ISO 800
Focal length – 35 mm
Camera – Nikon D700
Lens – AF NIKKOR 35mm f/2D

This is the parking lot of our diving ship RK-311 at an abandoned floating dock for repairing submarines on Moshchny Island. It was taken late in the evening with a shutter speed of 2.5 seconds. The sunset light painted everything in dark blue tones, and the yellow light of incandescent lamps accentuated the ship.

The main thing is not to be afraid, wait until it gets dark, put the camera on a tripod and open the shutter. And the result will be absolutely amazing.

Aperture – f/8.0
Shutter speed – 2.5, ISO 1600
Focal length – 50 mm
Camera – Nikon D3S
Lens – AF NIKKOR 50mm f/1.4D

Light painting

This is a legendary technique of cave explorers. You put the camera on a tripod, open the shutter to infinity (indicated as “bulb” on Nikon cameras). And then walk around and use a flashlight to illuminate the scene. In its pure form, light painting is done in absolute darkness: where you shine the light, a piece of the picture appears, and so you paint with a light brush until the entire image appears.

Aperture – f/10
Shutter speed – 62, ISO 400
Focal length –16 mm
Camera – Nikon D3X
Lens – AF Fisheye-NIKKOR 16mm f/2.8D

In addition to cave photography, still lifes are often shot with this technique. But light painting can be used in many other genres: travel, landscape, and even reportage photography. The main thing is that you have time to experiment. Light painting takes a monstrous amount of time: each frame takes about thirty seconds, plus another thirty seconds of rendering by the camera processor, and you need a certain number of takes to get the desired result. To get the hang of it, roughly speaking. But the result will be very unusual. You can create inconsistent, unnatural light patterns that will be perceived as strange by the viewer, and this will draw attention to your photo, it will look extremely unusual. It is completely unclear where the light is coming from, from what sources? Like, for example, in the photograph of a mining machine above. The exposure of this frame is 62 seconds, everything here was drawn with one small flashlight.

At the same time, people in the frame should not confuse you. And that's why. When you shine a flashlight, you only illuminate a small part of the frame. Meanwhile, your model can do whatever you want. For example, a photo with an exposure time below 13 seconds. No person can stand still for that long. But since this is light painting, your model can move freely unless you point the light at it. Lighting a person with a flashlight is a matter of seconds. A person can remain motionless for a second. Your goal is to teach the model to stand still as you draw her in the scene.

Aperture – f/10
Shutter speed – 13, ISO 100
Focal length – 14 mm
Camera – Nikon D4S

Recently I tried to use light painting in underwater photography, which no one had done before. For example, here is this photo with a shutter speed of 30 seconds: the camera was on a tripod, and I was floating with a flashlight, illuminating this scene.

Aperture – f/14
Shutter speed – 30, ISO 200
Focal length – 35 mm
Camera – Nikon D4S
Lens – AF-S NIKKOR 16-35mm f/4G ED VR

Combined light

The most difficult case is when you have a stationary, poorly exposed object and moving objects in one frame. Then you have to use combined light to freeze moving objects with flashes, and at a long shutter speed expose those that cannot be illuminated with flashes. For example, this shot with RK-311, our ship.

Aperture – f/4.5
Shutter speed – 15, ISO 4000
Focal length – 20 mm
Camera – Nikon D3S
Lens – AF NIKKOR 20mm f/2.8D

I wanted to take a picture of him floating under the starry sky. But if you simply put the camera on a tripod, the ship in the picture will appear black, and it will be impossible to see anything. And if you turn on the lights on the ship, then due to the waves the silhouette of the ship will blur at a long exposure. Therefore, I had to use combined light. I stood on the dam and put the camera on a tripod so that the stars appeared and the Perseid meteorites were drawn, the flow of which our planet was just crossing. Secondly, it was necessary to illuminate the ship from the side, so on the second pier I placed a flash with a tube on a tripod to give directional light to the ship. Thirdly, it was necessary to illuminate the ship from the inside, and constant light was not suitable, as I already told you why. So I also had to put flashes with radio synchronizers in the pilothouse and cabins and point them at the windows.

Aperture – f/10
Shutter speed – 6, ISO 1600
Focal length – 14 mm
Camera – Nikon D4S
Lens – AF-S NIKKOR 14-24mm f/2.8G ED

Light painting can become great solution in cases where it is impossible to remove during the day. For example, in canyons, due to the fact that it is a narrow gorge, the sun cannot get there and illuminate beautifully. Therefore, it is much better to take matters into your own hands and shoot at night with the cut-off pattern that you have in mind. Here is the example above: exposure 6 seconds, a person seems to be exploring the canyon. This is light painting with two lights, one of which is in front of the model, and the other holds the illuminator behind her.

Aperture – f/2.8
Shutter speed – 20, ISO 1600
Focal length – 14 mm
Camera – Nikon D700
Lens – AF-S NIKKOR 14-24mm f/2.8G ED

Aperture – f/13
Shutter speed – 1.6, ISO 800
Focal length – 20 mm
Camera – Nikon D4S

Photo entitled “I can’t hear you” - a combined light of 7 flashes, two flashlights and light painting. There is quite a large space here, and also a waterfall and a lake, and it was difficult to illuminate everything. Therefore, I put three underwater flashes in the water, froze people with land flashes, the walls of the canyon were illuminated with lanterns, plus I corrected the light pattern of the waterfall with light painting. Everything about everything in 1.6 seconds.

Aperture – f/6.3
Shutter speed – 1/4, ISO 400
Focal length – 24 mm
Camera – Nikon D3X
Lens – AF NIKKOR 24mm f/2.8D

Also, combined light allows you to separate plans, as in this photo. Here the foreground is lit with cool-temperature flashes, while the background is lit with a warm halogen flashlight mounted on a miner. But this light is not strong enough to compete with flashes, so the shutter speed must be long enough to render the background sufficiently. The application of different lights revealed the patterns of the rock on the ceiling, which was illuminated by the golden reflections of the lantern.

Aperture – f/5.6
Shutter speed – 1, ISO 200
Focal length – 20 mm
Camera – Nikon D4S
Lens – AF-S NIKKOR 20mm f/1.8G ED

Work "Prometheus Cave". Here the combined light was needed for another reason. The large accumulation of objects did not allow the cave to be illuminated normally - the flashes would inevitably produce hard shadows from all the objects. Or there had to be a lot of them in order to properly highlight such a composition. Therefore, I used the following scheme: a person is frozen with a flash, and the stalactites and stalagmites are illuminated with light painting to obtain more uniform lighting.

Light painting itself and combined lighting is the most interesting and little-studied area of photography, which requires a lot of time and physical effort, but the payoff is very high. This is what you want to do.

How to shoot at long exposures

To shoot at long exposures, you can't do without a stable tripod and a cable release with the ability to lock the shutter button. To reduce shutter shake, I recommend using the mirror pre-up mode. But if you suddenly find yourself somewhere without a tripod, and want to shoot at a long shutter speed, then the right stand and the ability to rest your elbows on something or lean the camera against something will help you. You can rest on your knee or elbow. Professional cameras allow you to shoot handheld at longer shutter speeds because they are heavier and more grippy. Personally, I shot handheld on the D3s and D4s with shutter speeds up to half a second. You need to understand that if you shoot handheld, the longer the shutter speed, the more takes you will have to do.

by Thomas Larsen

Many photographers, especially beginners, neglect the possibilities that shutter speed control provides. Most often, the aperture is set, and the shutter speed is used only for compensation in order to obtain a normal exposure. In this short photography tutorial, we'll look at how shutter speed can be used creatively and some of the mistakes photographers make when choosing shutter speed.

You should always know what you are shooting, why you are doing it and what results you can expect.

Five classic camera shutter speeds

1. Freeze motion, or shoot 1/250 s or faster

Using a fast shutter speed helps to get a fairly balanced shot, but makes the photo too static. Any movement in the frame will be frozen. You can fix this by trying to slightly change the camera's tilt to get a more dynamic photo composition. But the best option is to use the wiring technique, which we will write about later.

The faster the subject moves, the shorter the shutter speed should be. For example:

fast moving cars or animals: 1/1000 s;
mountain bikes or running people: 1/500 s;
waves: 1/250 s.

It should be remembered that individual parts of the object can move very quickly. A striking example of this is a helicopter. The fuselage itself can be frozen at a shutter speed of 1/250, but for the blades even 1/2000 may not be enough. Or, for example, when photographing a girl fluttering her hair in order to freeze the ends of her hair, it is also necessary to use shutter speeds of the order of 1/1000 or even less, while the model itself is moving relatively slowly.

How do you solve the problem of “lubrication”?

You can take a lot of shots, but knowing the laws of physics and the peculiarities of recording frames on a memory card, they do it differently. First, about physics: if you throw a ball up, when will it have the highest speed, and at what point the lowest? That's right - the largest one is when the ball just comes off the hand, and the smallest one is at the point where it stops to fly down, i.e. at the peak of its movement along the top-down flight path.

When filming competitions, where, say, motorcyclists take off on a springboard, the most interesting point is the dive, which is also the “slowest” in terms of movement. Shooting as many frames as possible is not the best approach to solving the problem. At some point, the camera will simply stop to record everything on the flash drive, and at sporting events such a delay can lead to the loss of the best shot.

Use a series of 2-3 frames instead, but while your main subject is at the peak of his or her movement. This approach gives the photographer the best chance of capturing the best images by allowing the camera enough time to record the frame to the memory card without locking up.

2. Shooting with wiring

When shooting with tracking, when using a camera to track the movement of an object, shutter speed plays a very important role. It must be in the range from 1/15 to 1/250 s.

If you have a lot of time, you can make calculations - what shutter speed will be needed to photograph cars moving in a certain area, but in reality everything is a little simpler. If everything in the frame is too blurry, then you need to make the shutter speed shorter.

If the frame freezes the movement of the car, then an increase in exposure time is required. And don’t forget that 1/125 is a longer period of time than 1/250

For example, some quantities that photographers most often use:

fast moving cars, motorcycles or birds: 1/125 s;
mountain bikes close to camera: 1/60 sec;
mountain bikes, animal movement or human work: 1/30 sec.

by Jamey Price 1/60

3. How to use slow shutter speed

It is also called creative blur - 1/15 s to 1 s.

Here it is necessary to make a small technical digression and remind you what a camera is. This is an image capture tool that allows you to somewhat imitate the human eye, the human gaze. But having created this tool, man began to receive unusual effects that are difficult to see in life. Our vision conventionally “takes 25 frames” per second in normal lighting, and we are accustomed to seeing the world as we see it. But the camera, due to the fact that it is different, can show us the world differently.

In particular, make a frame overlay () or with a slightly longer shutter speed show the blur of moving objects, turning them into a line.

A similar effect can be observed with your eyes if you quickly turn a flashlight in complete darkness. An eye adapted to darkness will perceive a moving spotlight as a line.

A slow shutter speed is used to photograph, for example, a waterfall. In this case, specialists, of course, use manual settings and , but you can simply set the camera to shutter priority mode (Tv).

by Roland Maria, 3"

Here are some shutter speeds for motion blur:

fast waterfall: 1/8 s;
people walking near the shooting point; waves; slow water movement: 1/4 sec.

In bright light conditions (on a sunny day), it may be difficult to obtain the required shutter speed (below 1/8 sec.), even by changing the aperture or using low ISO settings. To reduce the amount of light, use a neutral gray (ND) filter, which is exactly what it is designed for. In ours you can find neutral gray filters of variable density, which allow you to reduce the amount of light passing through the lens to almost zero and can even turn a sunny day into night. Well, and of course, when using long exposures, it becomes mandatory to use or.

4. Photography with shutter speed from 1 s to 30 s

This effect can only be achieved if you use a tripod. At the same time, it can no longer be light and portable, but a stable and heavy model is needed, since even a slight wind will affect image acquisition. Photographers often use a simple technique - they hang additional weight on a tripod, and most often this weight in hiking conditions is a working photo backpack. On most tripods you can see a hook at the bottom for hanging the load and, accordingly, giving it greater stability. Additionally, we recommend that you familiarize yourself with some other working techniques -.

Excerpts that photographers use to create photos like this:

the movement of the wind in the leaves of the trees: 30 s;
smooth movement of the sea surface: 15 s;
fast moving clouds: 8 sec;
waves with some details preserved: 1 s.

If you plan to shoot before sunrise or after sunset, be prepared for the light to change very quickly, so you'll need to change your aperture (or use a faster or slower shutter speed).

5. Shooting at night - shutter speed over 30 s

Shooting at night means there is very little light. Accordingly, many photographers want to increase the value, which most often leads to an increase in noise when individual pixels begin to appear much brighter than others.

If you leave the ISO minimal and just set a long shutter speed, this will lead to some reduction in image noise.

Most often, astrophotographers—that is, people who photograph the starry sky—face such problems. In addition, with long exposures, due to the rotation of the Earth, an effect occurs when the stars line up in a round dance.

In order to avoid this, special equatorial mounts (tripods for telescopes) are used, which allow them to compensate for the movement of the Earth.

For example, to photograph the night sky you might need the following exposure times:

individual stars or full moon landscapes: 2 min.;
star tracks: 10 min.

Global bug fixes

Hand trembling

In addition to the fact that the selected shutter speed should depend on the speed of the object and the amount of light, we remind you that the shutter speed is also affected by such a phenomenon as blur from natural hand trembling. The longer the focal length of the lens, the shorter the shutter speed should be. You can roughly calculate it as follows - the focal length in mm corresponds to the shutter speed in fractions of a second. That is, with a 50 mm lens, you can shoot handheld at a shutter speed of at least 1/50 sec without fear of blurring (unless, of course, you are dancing at this time or riding a tour bus), and for 200 mm you will already need 1/200 sec.

Even a simple monopod allows you to increase shutter speed by 1-2 times. The photographer has the opportunity to shoot with longer shutter speeds. A good tripod allows you to take photographs at any shutter speed.

Exposure duration - qualitative indicator even with . According to the observations of professional portrait photographers, at a shutter speed of 1/50, portraits turn out “alive.” With longer shutter speeds, blur appears, and with shorter shutter speeds, portraits turn out too frozen.

The inability to correctly use the camera shutter speed will lead a novice photographer to stagnation in creative development. There is no need to be afraid to master what is initially difficult to perceive. Ask questions, together we will look for answers from advanced and professional photographers.