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After seeing some of the excellent long exposure photographs taken by a fellow Tasmanian (well, I’m sort of Tasmanian after 16 years here), Alex Wise, I was inspired to give it a go myself.

Long exposure photographs involve using a neutral density filter on the front of the camera lens. This cuts down on the amount of light entering the lens, but without affecting the colour of the image. As a consequence the camera’s shutter must be left open longer to capture the same amount of light as it would have without the filter. This in turn results in photographs with blurred motion for elements that move (e.g. water, clouds, etc) and the resulting photographs have a markedly different look to those taken with fast shutter speeds.

My first step on this journey was to get myself a B+W #110 neutral density filter. This particular filter cuts the amount of light entering the lens by 10 f-stops. Possessing the filter I then went off to take my first test shot:

Although it may not be obvious at first, the water in this shot appears smooth as a consequence of the longer shutter speed capturing the motion of the water of the period of the longer exposure (30 seconds in this case). To see what the scene really looked like, checkout the below photograph, which was taken without the filter, and a consequently faster shutter speed of 1/60th of a second:

With the filter having only just arrived this week I haven’t had any more of a chance to play with it, but I’m looking forward to getting some more practice. I’m also considering whether I also need to get a graduated filter to go with it—that is, one that is dark at the top and fades out to clear at the bottom. The advantage of such a filter is that it would allow for better overall exposure of sunset/sunrise photographs, where the sky is often brighter than the foreground. In the mean time I might have to try my hand at some HDR, like in the following (knocked-up) effort, combining two images with different exposures to get a correctly exposed sky and foreground: