We have all seen beautiful landscape photos with smooth-as-glass water or the light trails from a car's tail lights and headlights. Well, you can also eliminate people and cars in a usually busy area by leaving your exposure on for several minutes.
You will need an ND filter if you are shooting during the day. An ND filter (neutral density) filter is like sunglasses for your camera. There are different shades of darkness depending on the amount of light and what effect you are wanting to create. The prices range from low to pretty high depending on the brand. There is some math involved to get the proper shutter speed time, but if you’re like me and you don’t want to do the math, there are a couple of apps that do the math for you, such as Lee Stopper and Nisi.
A tripod is required if you want the main subject to be in focus. There is so much creativity to be had in long-exposure photography, and you can make your photos stand out by getting creative with effects or removing people and cars from a normally busy area, like mentioned above. You can also create incredible lighting effects or “paint’ with your own lights,such as a flashlight or colored LED lights, like this famous TikToker.
You can create long exposure at night without an ND filter as well. Get out and experiment. You can get really creative with long-exposure photography, and it’s not a typical photo that anyone can take.
Very interesting article. Thank you.
Excellent! Finally, a video that not only shows the creative results of long exposure but also gives us a complete and thorough tutorial on the mechanics, information sorely lacking from the vast majority of long exposure videos. Thank you for the inspiration.
I'm glad you liked the video.
Nicely presented, inspirational video. Thank you