DIY Photography

Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time

  • News
  • Inspiration
  • Reviews
  • Tutorials
  • DIY
  • Gear
Search

Submit A Story

How to easily shoot long exposure photographs at night

Jan 22, 2019 by John Aldred 8 Comments

  • Share
  • Tweet
  • Flipboard
  • WhatsApp

Long exposures are a lot of fun to shoot and experiment with. Although they can take some time to create (they are long exposures, after all), you’re never quite sure what you’re going to get until it’s finally over and the shutter closes. But they’re a lot easier to shoot than most people think. In this video, Pierre Lambert breaks down the process into simple steps.

One of the great things about long exposure photography is that it forces you to learn about the exposure triangle. It’s a simple formula that helps you to understand how you can adjust your ISO, aperture and shutter speed while still maintaining a good exposure. But before we get to that, let’s take a look at the basic steps to getting a good night time long exposure.

  1. Put your camera up on your tripod (yes, you need a tripod)
  2. Set up a 2 or 5-second delay timer on your camera, so that when you hit the shutter, you can let go of the camera. This prevents you from accidentally introducing camera movement into your shot.
  3. Experiment. Set your ISO high so you can get some quick shots to figure out your composition.

Once you’ve got something that you like the look of, this is where the exposure triangle comes into play. The idea with long exposure is, as the name suggests, to lengthen the duration your shutter is open to capture events over time in a single shot. But when you extend your shutter you let light hit the sensor for longer, so you need to reduce the light somewhere else. Namely, your aperture or your ISO.

Doing it with your aperture is fairly straightforward. If you lengthen your shutter speed by a stop, close down your aperture by a stop. This will give you more depth of field, and for something like a long exposure city shot, you’ll want to make sure you have enough depth of field to get everything you want in focus.

Once your lens aperture is giving you the amount of depth of field you need, the next step is to lower the ISO. You want to bring this down as low as possible to minimise the amount of noise in the image. But, remember, it’s night time. It’s dark. And once you start getting shutter speeds in the range of full seconds, they can get very long, very quickly. So, depending on how much depth of field you need, and how big a slice of time you wish to capture, your ISO may not be all the way down as low as your camera can go.

But that’s basically the process for shooting. Easy, huh? If you don’t want to deal with a 2-5 second delay before the start of each photo, or want to shoot long exposures longer than your camera will allow (typically 30 seconds), you can use a wired or wireless trigger, instead.

Post-processing long exposures is a different matter entirely and is as varied a process as working with any other type of photograph. Pierre goes through his post workflow for a long exposure shot he created. His post work on this particular image is fairly extensive, but you’ll be able to pick up a lot of tips and tricks along the way, so it’s well worth a watch.

FIND THIS INTERESTING? SHARE IT WITH YOUR FRIENDS!

  • Share
  • Tweet
  • Flipboard
  • WhatsApp

Related posts:

How To Properly Shoot Landscape Night Photographs Default ThumbnailPhoto Breakdown – Amazing Star Trails Night Exposure Know The Difference Between Correct Exposure And Creatively Correct Exposure This is why your night sky photography sucked last night

Filed Under: Tutorials Tagged With: long exposure, Long Exposures, night photography, pierre lambert, tutorial

About John Aldred

John Aldred is a photographer with over 20 years of experience in the portrait and commercial worlds. He is based in Scotland and has been an early adopter - and occasional beta tester - of almost every digital imaging technology in that time. As well as his creative visual work, John uses 3D printing, electronics and programming to create his own photography and filmmaking tools and consults for a number of brands across the industry.

« These are the breathtaking winning photos of 2018 Wildlife Photographer of the Year contest
Watch a meteor crash into the Moon during the recent lunar eclipse »

Submit A Story

Get our FREE Lighting Book

DIYP lighting book cover

* download requires newsletter signup
DIYPhotography

Recent Comments

Free Resources

Advanced lighting book

Recent Posts

  • Sony teases upcoming ZV-E1 full-frame vlogging camera coming on March 29
  • The Xencelabs Pen Display 24 is silent, glare-free retouching tablet
  • Fall in love with astrophotography with these 10 space objects
  • Hipstamatic app relaunches as a social network, but only for iOS
  • Instagram now has ads even in search results. Sigh

Alex Baker is a portrait and lifestyle driven photographer based in Valencia, Spain. She works on a range of projects from commercial to fine art and has had work featured in publications such as The Daily Mail, Conde Nast Traveller and El Mundo, and has exhibited work across Europe

Dave Williams is an accomplished travel photographer, writer, and best-selling author from the UK. He is also a photography educator and published Aurora expert. Dave has traveled extensively in recent years, capturing stunning images from around the world in a modified van. His work has been featured in various publications and he has worked with notable brands such as Skoda, EE, Boeing, Huawei, Microsoft, BMW, Conde Nast, Electronic Arts, Discovery, BBC, The Guardian, ESPN, NBC, and many others.

John Aldred is a photographer with over 20 years of experience in the portrait and commercial worlds. He is based in Scotland and has been an early adopter - and occasional beta tester - of almost every digital imaging technology in that time. As well as his creative visual work, John uses 3D printing, electronics and programming to create his own photography and filmmaking tools and consults for a number of brands across the industry.

Dunja Djudjic is a multi-talented artist based in Novi Sad, Serbia. With 15 years of experience as a photographer, she specializes in capturing the beauty of nature, travel, and fine art. In addition to her photography, Dunja also expresses her creativity through writing, embroidery, and jewelry making.

Copyright © DIYPhotography 2006 - 2023 | About | Contact | Advertise | Write for DIYP | Full Disclosure | Privacy Policy