Long exposure

Many of us at least once saw pictures of water as ice or fog, with a strange blurred sky or people in the form of ghosts.

Such photos are made on a long exposure. If at night, even at a high ISO value, the camera asks us for shutter speeds from 15 to 30 seconds, then in the daytime, even at a fully closed aperture, the shutter speed does not reach 1 second!

That the exposure was relatively long, and sometimes even very (more than 1 minute), for this there are neutral gray filters. Indicated as ND - Neutral Density and next to the number from 2 to 1000. The figure denotes the degree of dimming of light or density. The densest of the existing ones is the ND1000, which can give an exposure of more than 1 minute on a sunny day.

What is the purpose of using such filters? There are several of them: removal of passers-by and cars when shooting architecture (at long exposures, moving objects do not remain in the picture), blurring of the sky and water, shooting a portrait on a bright sunny day.

We'll talk about blurring the sky and water as a creative reception. For shooting, we need a tripod, a trigger cable (remote control) to shoot in "B" mode - Bulb, a high-density filter, which would be able to give us an exposure time of more than 30 seconds. Exposure (aperture, shutter speed and ISO) is selected only experimentally. There are no specific figures for any photographer. If we shoot water and the sky, then accordingly, it is necessary to choose cloudy and windy weather. To have more waves and ripples on the water and textured clouds moved quickly.

When shooting people to achieve the effect of movement or make them look like ghosts, the exposure does not need to be too long, from 5 to 15 seconds. To do this, use a better medium density filter.

When shooting a landscape, you need to take into account that everything that moves - will be blurry. For example, foreground, grass, trees. But this we can play and on hand, looking at what our creative idea.