Botany Bay, Sydney Australia by Travis Chau on 500px
When I first start learning photography, I have experimented with many types of photography. And the most interesting of those photography was long exposure. When you first tried it you\’re going to say \”WOW\”. Can a camera do that?
What are the guidelines when you take long exposure photography? Clouds and water makes great photograph in long exposure. The light is always the key to any photograph, long exposure or not. So the best time to photograph for landscape at least is the golden hour and blue hour.
Camera settings and camera discipline is another key. You have to put your camera on a tripod. No cowboy here people. Depends on the scene and composition you going for, but to get a silky feel to the water you need at least 1 minutes exposure.
To get over a minute exposure you need a 6 or 10 stop ND filter(neutral density filter). ND filters are basically a sun glass for your lens. You want to cut out how much light you want to go into your sensor. It is a balance from there and you must know your exposure triangle really well other wise the maths could be confusing. It doesn\’t matter you get to see the back of the camera. That\’s another tip there for you. You could do by trail and error if you want to, but know the exposure triangle will certainly help in your understanding.
Colour noise is an issue we have to deal with as well. Somehow the effort of lifting the shutter up for longer than a few minutes required a great effort in the camera power and technologies. There\’s in built camera noise reduction but your camera is paralysed for the amount of time of the exposure. So for example you take a 1 minute exposure, the camera is going to take another minute to do noise reduction. So experiment with it if the noise in camera or in post processing could do the job
Timelapse Nuts 