8 Tips for Long Exposure Photography

Tree in water
Originally uploaded by Joop Snijder

I love long exposures. The motion blur and sometimes unpredictable results are fascinating. I want to share some tips in order to shoot great long exposure shots.

1. Clean your sensor
Make sure you clean your sensor before going out. With the use of small apertures (see further), you'll all sensor spots. Without cleaning there will be a lot of Photoshop post-processing to clean up the photo.

2. Check your batteries
We're talking about long exposures, that can take seconds, minutes of even an hour. I shot photos with 30 minutes exposure. So charged batteries are a must and spare batteries as well.

3. Carry your tripod
With the long exposures, you can't do without a tripod. In windy conditions you need a firm and sturdy one. Make sure the tripod stands still and use your camera bag for extra weight.

4. Grab your filters
Everything that holds back the light will do. Circular polarizers reduce two stops of light. There are all kinds of Neutral Density filters. But for this particular photo, I used a Hoya ND 400, which holds back 10 stops of light.

5. Get the longest exposure
Set the camera ISO to the lowest value possible (e.g. 50 or 100) and set the aperture to the smallest setting (e.g. f/22). With these settings we'll get the maximum exposure possible.

6. Use the Bulb Mode
Set your camera to bulb mode. Most cameras have a maximum exposure of 30 seconds in other modes. With the bulb mode you can go beyond 30 seconds and choose your own exposure length.

7. Use a Remote Control
To get pin sharp results, you need a remote control, so you don't have to touch your camera during the exposure.

8. Enjoy the view
During the exposure you have all the time to enjoy the view and explore the surroundings for next exposures.

Splash of water

Gavin Hoey demonstrates on his site how to photograph a splash and demonstrates the strobist set up required to capture the beauty hidden in a drop of water.

Here's my result. Instead of using a printed background, I used a colored plastic bag of a local shoe store. It gave my drop a warm red color with a blue/gray touch. There's plenty to experiment.

Check Gavins blog right here or watch his tutorial below:

10 Tips for Great Forest Photos

It can be hard and frustrating to take photos into a forest. Harsh shadows, burned out highlights in the end result. Here are 10 tips and one bonus to improve your landscape forest photos:

1. Use a tripod
Because light levels drop quickly when you're going deeper into the forest, shutter speeds will rise fastly. Use a tripod for pin sharp results.

2. Bring your cirulair polarizer
With a lots of greens and in during autumn reds and yellow, you can saturate them more by using a circulair polarizer. Don't forget to reposition the polarizer each time. Be aware light levels will drop even more with the use of the polarizer and it can add up to 2 stops of shutter speed (=it makes your shutter speed 4x slower).

3. Explore vertical compositions
Make use of vertical compositions as well. It creates a sense of depth and it can make look trees taller and more dramatic. Try to reframe each horizontal landscape shot with a vertical portrait composition to explore the possibilities.

4. Embrace overcast days
Especially on bright overcast days, you can get great forest shots. Due to the lack of direct sunlight, you don't get harsh shadows and burned out highlights. The clouds are working like a huge softbox to diffuse the light.

5. Enjoy some rain
Even with some slight rain, you can get great vibrant forest photos. The rain will saturate the colors naturally. If you're lucky and you'll stay dry under the trees.

6. Find natural lines
Forests can be very chaotic, so find natural lins or ordering to get a clear composition. E.g. use a dirt road or a creek as a lead in line. Move around carefully to order trees up into a row, etc. One small step can make a big difference.

7. Change perspective
Use a long lens to tighten trees together. I will look like the trees are more together and this creates a sense of depth. With a wide angle lens, get down to the ground to emphasize the the foreground.

8. Get the most out of sunrise and sunset
During sunrise or sunset, stay close to the edge of the forest to get the most out of the beautiful light at this time of the day. Deeper into the forest, there's less sunlight and it's harder to find places where you get the right light.

9. Use side lighting
When using side lighting, trees getting a nice 3D look and look round in the end result. With front lighting the trunk will be evenly lit and look flat. With side light the trunk goes from light to dark and will look round. On an overcast day use a compass to determine where the light is coming from.

10. Bring in a human element
A person in the frame, even very small, can create a focal point. You can also use a self timer and position yourself into the frame to emphasize the size of trees or wideness of an area.

Bonus Tip
And last but not least: leave enough bread crumbs behind to find your way back ;-)

Tip: Canon Documentation

I must admit that I don't have all my manuals in one place and sometimes it's hard to find them. And today I bought an older Canon speedlight 430EZ without a manual. So searching for a good manual online, I found this neat website with a lot of Canon EOS documentation here: http://eosdoc.com/

Lightroom Tip: Speed up import with Favourite Develop Preset

I gathered a lot of Adobe Lightroom presets on the internet and developed quite a few myself. The Develop Presets are very good starting points to take a photo to where I wanted it. So, altough I use them a lot, there are just a few I want to apply initially on the whole imported set.

In the Information to Apply section in the import dialog, you can select a Develop setting. Lightroom will apply the selected Develop Preset to all photos being imported.

When having a long list of Develop Presets, (like me 700+), it takes ages to scroll down and find the Develop Preset I want to be used to process my photos. A lot of my 700+ Develop Presets are not suited to use as an initial preset for the whole set. I use them on individual photos. Actually, I'm only using 3 Develop Presets at the time at the import stage.

So to access them easily, I used a little trick. In de Develop Presets folder of Lightroom, you can find it in Lightroom by choosing Edit->Preferences->Presets->Show Lightroom Presets Folder ..., I created a new folder called 00 - Favourites and I copied my favourite Develop Presets into this folder (Auto Enhance - Landscape, Autumn Level 3, Matt's Auto Adjustment).

After restarting Lightroom and importing new photos you still got this huge and long list of Develop Presets, but just after the default Lightroom Presets, I find my favourite ones. Now it's easy to find my Develop Presets and this speeds up my workflow.

Hope you like this trick.

Free Lightroom Keyword Hierarchy: Dog Breeds

After the flowers, here's a extesive list of dog breeds to download for free.

You can download the keywords here at the download section. Help about importing keywords can be found at the Adobe Lightroom Help.

Lightroom Preset - Spot Light

Here's a Lightroom 2.x preset which turns on a spot light in the Bottom Right corner of the photo. You can download the preset here.



If you like the preset, please let me know and I will post the whole set.