Farting Around With Long Exposures
Posted by Stephen on
March 2, 2008
The next thing that is often tried is an increase of ISO which also increases the noise in your photos. Unfortunately, noise is bad and on the tiny sensors of point and shoot cameras, the noise happens even at moderate ISO’s of 400. So finally, in order to keep our pictures natural looking and not flashed to hell, we have to look at longer exposures which entail decreasing the shutter speed to give the sensor a chance to collect more light. Unfortunately, it is impossible to hand hold any of these shots, due to camera shake, which is why a tripod is often necessary.
This past week, I had a chance to grab the tripod and my Nikon D200, and headed out to Granville Island in Vancouver with my photography class to experiment with long exposures, higher ISO’s, and a whole range of f stops. The picture above was taken using an f stop of 16 and an ISO of 100. I didn’t have a trigger cable so the longest exposure that I could set was 30 seconds which yielded some very interesting results.
I also goofed around with what I call the “Starship Enterprise” effect where you use a longer exposure and then zoom in, creating a streaking effect. I also had fun with lighting and flashes. I wasn’t really trying to compose the shots properly, but just wanted to see all the things that my camera could do in low light with a tripod and long exposures. You would think that a flash would be the key to great pictures in the dark, but what I found was that the best pictures were done totally flash free. For more pictures from my outing, you can check out my photo gallery over at Futurelooks.
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Amazing shots Stephen! You should really start taking more pictures and posting it on Flickr for us bloggers
-Mike
p.s. or maybe you should create some sort of a free service (with copyright), so we can request a few pics.
Thanks Mike!
The Futurelooks Photogallery belongs to me so I tend to upload my stuff there. It does watermark my photos so that I know that they’re mine.
Great photos Stephen!
The Light art ones you were playing with is pretty cool too. They were doing some of that over at the NorthernVoice thing that they recently just has in Vancouver.
Do HDR next! I want to see how well those turn out!, the first image you have here on the blog would look cool in HDR.
I’m not sure if I have the patience for HDR. I enjoy my rapid fire paparazzi style sometimes
Very cool….just when I was starting to experiment with avoiding the flash I sent my camera in for repair of the built-in flash as having a broken camera just bothered me. I’m still waiting for it to come back and really miss my camera, lol.