The ultimate guide to long exposure photography

It is a well-known fact that a camera sees the world differently from the human eye and brain. In many ways, it's a miracle that what the camera captures ever comes anywhere near what we see in the real world. 

After all, we see everything in three dimensions, in 360-degrees all around us, and in constant motion. At the same time, the camera captures just a small, static two-dimensional slice of the world, a single moment in time completely frozen. 

The mood and dynamic energy that we perceive and experience – often the result of a lot of non-visual data and the things we see – can be completely lost in a photo shot in the 'standard' kind of way. 

By 'standard', I mean a shot taken with the camera hand-held and the shutter fired at, say, 1/60 or 1/125 of a second. Flowing, splashing, crashing water suddenly looks dead and devoid of energy. Blowing trees may become either completely still or perhaps slightly blurred as if the lens hasn't focussed properly, and fast-moving clouds grind to a halt. 

So how do we overcome this to attempt to instil some of that real-world mood into our photographs? There are several techniques, but one of the most important is blurred motion photography – the use of a slow shutter speed to deliberately blur moving objects in the frame, such as scudding clouds and flowing water, to put over the sense of movement. It can be hugely effective in generating mood, and these days is widely used in photography for this end.

In this article, I cover using genuinely long exposures – at least 10 seconds, usually significantly more, even in broad daylight – to generate photographic art that looks incredibly atmospheric to some eyes, to others, rather surreal and other-worldly. Not everyone likes it, but it is an increasingly used technique in fine art landscape photography. Let's dive in and take a look.

The right kinds of subjects 

For long exposure photography to be effective, you need to have landscape scenes containing plenty of movement. For this reason, much of this type of fine art photography involves water and skies. So fast-flowing rivers or surf rolling onto the shore, coupled with streaming clouds figured prominently, the providers of all the blur and movement you could need.

However, an image with only blurred movement and nothing else will rarely work as an effective image. All that blur must be juxtaposed against something rock-solid, lit either in silhouette or in detail, an item that forms the image frame's photographic hub hook or subject.

The blurred moving cloud and water swirl around it, setting the image's mood. In much of this photography, the solid object is typically a tree or building, such as a lighthouse or tower. Or something as large as a mountain. Just about anything that is solid, immovable, has a great shape/outline, and can be used to dominate the image frame without any distracting elements creeping in around it. 

The equipment you'll need

With exposure times of 10 seconds and upwards, the first piece of kit you'll need is a good stable tripod. Your camera will have to be held rock steady without the slightest movement, no matter how long the exposure or how bad the weather conditions are. Whether hot sunshine, wind, rain, soft sand, slippery rocks or snow, your tripod must not move even a fraction of a millimetre. Without this, all your attempts at this kind of photography will result in blurred images due to camera movement.

The second piece of kit will be a camera with a bulb setting. Most good cameras allow for set exposure times up to 30 seconds. For longer exposures, you need to use the camera's bulb setting to keep the shutter open for as long as you like. Just trigger the shutter button to open the shutter, manually count the time you want, and then trigger the shutter button again to close the shutter. 

However, this does not usually work by actually pressing the shutter button with a finger. For one thing, this would risk causing camera shake and hence blurred images, and usually would also result in the shutter closing again as soon as the finger is released from the shutter button. 

So this leads to the third piece of kit you'll need: a remote shutter release, operated either via a cable or wirelessly. With the camera in bulb mode, press your remote shutter release once to open the shutter. Press it a second time to close the shutter.

A word of reassurance about the bulb mode: just about all DSLR and mirrorless cameras include this really important exposure control mode. So provided you're using any of these, you should have nothing to worry about.

The fourth piece of kit is a set of neutral density filters and the relevant holders to mount them in front of your lens(es). Not surprisingly, there is far too much light during the daytime for an exposure of, say, 30 seconds or a minute to normally result in an image that is anything but massively over-exposed, no matter how much you shut down the lens aperture. This is true even on the nastiest, rainiest day. 

So what you need to do is cut down the amount of light getting to the sensor from the outside world: the role of neutral density (or ND) filters. These reduce the transmission of light without affecting the colour balance of that light (hopefully!), thus greatly increasing exposure times. They come in a wide range of densities, from simply a one-stop/1 EV reduction (i.e. a halving of the amount of light) to a whopping 10-stop/10 EV reduction ( a huge 2048-fold reduction) and even more. 

In general, the lower densities are not very useful for daytime long exposure photography, while anything greater than 10-stop is usually a case of overkill. I usually use a six-stop filter, giving a 128-fold reduction in the amount of light transmitted. 

These filters are available in circular form, screwing onto the front of the lens and as square filters that slide into a holder that mounts onto the lens. Although both can be useful, I generally prefer the square form. It is not uncommon to use an ND filter with a neutral density graduated (ND-grad) filter. This is a partially darkened filter, in which one half is darkened. 

The other half is left clear, important for selectively darkening an overly-bright part of the view, usually the sky. Use the two types of filters together, the ND to increase the entire exposure time, the ND-grad to darken the sky a little more than the landscape. ND-grads have to come in a rectangular form to be useful, so the latter need to be rectangular or square to work in conjunction with the ND filters.

These filters become less and less important as we move beyond dusk until dawn. Indeed, if you're shooting during full night, you won't need any filters at all, unless perhaps you're shooting in the middle of a brightly lit city.

So once you've got all these pieces of kit together, you're ready for some truly long exposure photography. Let's now look at some techniques.

Techniques and skills

It might be tempting to think that the technique consists of setting up the camera on a tripod, adding an ND filter to the front of the lens and then shooting as one would for any normal landscape photography. However, things are not quite that simple.

Since these are long exposures that include both static and moving components, you need to be able to predict – as far as is possible – how those moving elements are going to move during the exposure, how much they're going to move, and in which directions they're going to move, and the types of patterns they're likely to create.

Inevitably, there is quite a lot of guesswork involved in this, but as you gain experience and acquire both successes and failures, your ability to predict how things should turn out will greatly improve. 

Nevertheless, it is almost inevitable that you'll need to take multiple shots of the same view when shooting any scene. Every resulting image will be rather different due to the vagaries of your moving components, whether water or sky, for example. Even if every single image can be a success, technically and aesthetically, they will all be different, and you will have your preferences (which may change with time!).

It's a good idea to remember that the amount of blur achieved in the final images will greatly impact their mood. For example, long exposure or fast movement will blur that movement into a soft, silken sheet that can be either beautifully calming or actually - if it goes too far - just rather bland, if not almost blank. A shorter exposure and slower movement, on the other hand, often results in 'jagged' movement that can be agitated or dynamic. 

It can be difficult to balance: a very calm and peaceful dusk view, for example, can be ruined by the partial blur of scudding clouds, adding a very agitated, dynamic element to an otherwise peaceful scene.

Likewise, a long exposure can render a raging, stormy sea as some ethereal, calming scene, and the rolling waves blur out into a gossamer mist that will put over a wholly different mood from that of an angry storm. So it's important to try to obtain the right kind of movement for the mood you want to convey.

Quite apart from the unpredictability of the result, there is simply the challenge of being able to take the shot. When you have a quite dense ND filter on the front of your lens, it's virtually impossible to see anything through it, so it is essential to focus and compose the frame before adding it. You will then need to move the filter into place very carefully to not change either the composition or the focus. 

This is particularly tricky if you also need to add an ND graduated filter to darken just the sky a little. Add this first to get this filter and its dark/light horizon in the right place, then slide the ND filter in, but between the ND grad and the front of the lens. This latter point is important as the ND filter needs to be up against the filter holder to ensure no light leaks around the sides and into the lens.

When it comes to getting the right exposure, some photographers claim that you need to get the exposure before putting the ND filter in place and then make a complex correcting calculation to work out what the exposure will be once the filter is added. In my experience, however, the camera's TTL exposure meter system works perfectly through the filter: it simply acts as if night has fallen and measures the light accordingly. 

Photographic art

This style of photography has become quite popular among fine art landscape photographers, particularly those wanting to 'paint' with light to create artistic, moody images rather than literal records of a scene. The solid, immobile elements within the resulting images provide a powerful hook to draw the eye into an image and will often be the main subject.

The moving elements – usually flowing water or scudding clouds – really set the mood, creating something that can range from soft, soothing and comforting to dynamic, agitated and angry. The trick is to match the right mood to the kind of scene on hand and what you, the artist, are trying to convey.

The technique lends itself particularly well to scenes where the landscape's colour palette is quite limited, such as simply a restricted range of yellows or browns or blues across the scene. This is because a multitude of colours will often clash with the moods created by the blurring, adding some distractions from the main aim of the image. For this reason, it has become particularly popular in black-and-white photography, absolutely ensuring a strict restriction of colour diversity.

So if the idea of getting deep into the skills of moody photographic art, long exposure photography might be for you. Get stuck in and start experimenting.

This blog was written by a hugely experienced Devon-based professional photographer. Nigel works with the USA's prestigious National Geographic Image Collection, among many other bodies, and is a Fellow of the British Institute of Professional Photography.

Nigel runs regular photography workshops in southwest England. To find out more about these, go to https://www.nigelhicks.com/photography-workshops-courses/.

To find out more about Nigel's work in general, feel free to take a tour of his website at www.nigelhicks.com.

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