Impact of long exposure

In this article, I’m trying to convey the impact of long exposure in landscape photography, as everyone knows what is long exposure, but still I will give one liner explanation for the benefit of newbie into photography.

Long exposure is exposing the shutter for more duration (e.g: 2 seconds or 3 seconds or more) to capture more light, which results in better dreamy/dramatic image when the subject is dynamic.

To make good landscape photo we need better composition, good lighting and post processing but setting the shutter to longer duration makes the image more dreamy and dramatic. Sometimes it is difficult even to identify the same location when seen in long exposure photographs.

Have a look at the below normal exposure versus long exposure photographs

Best time to photograph long exposure

Golden hour
Blue hour

The long exposure image shot in golden hour will have fresh, warm, positive mood and similarly the image taken in blue hour will have peace/calm mood.

Best places to take long exposures

Waterscapes/seascapes
Moving clouds
Waterfalls
Moving vehicles & many more…

Long exposure Techniques

With ND filters – With Neutral Density filters we can make longer shutter duration which will create beautiful images, even we can shoot in mid day in hard light when ND filters are used.
Without ND filters – We can shoot long exposures even without filters but we need to shoot in the low light, if taken in mid day or post sunrise or pre-sunset the images will be overexposed
Multiple exposures stacking – Stacking is a one of the technique to make long exposure images, where this doesn’t require ND filters and by using this technique we can even take long exposure in mid day in hard light or in any time of the day. This technique requires us to take multiple image of the same composition we like to shoot and stack it using Lightroom/Photoshop and make it as a single long exposure image.

Personally I follow the stacking technique to make long exposure image most of time and sometimes I take without ND filters and rarely I use ND filter.

There several advantages for stacking of images, some of them are less or no noise, more detailing, better colors and high resolution images

Please share your comments/thoughts to write2me.saravanan@outlook.com

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