What kind of photos can I take with a long exposure?

Speaking of shutter, I said that shutter can control the exposure time. We can use a high-speed shutter to freeze the moving subject, or we can use a slow shutter to shoot the trajectory of the subject when it is moving.

This way is long exposure photography. When the scene includes fixed and moving objects, such as fixed streets and moving vehicles, long exposure can be used to shoot interesting effects, such as light trails. The theme of taking interesting pictures with long exposure is not only shooting light tracks, but also many other different types of photographs.

Like landscape, we can use long exposure to blur the movement of clouds or leaves in the sky and make the picture look more abstract.

Long exposure can also be used to shoot water, especially when shooting waterfalls or water levels. Long exposure can atomize the flowing water and make the water look beautiful as silk. By extending the exposure time, the fast-flowing water can become calmer, and even the raging waterfall can look like cotton candy. One or two seconds of exposure is enough to soften the flowing water and produce different textures. Longer exposure can completely soften water and create a unique silky effect.

When shooting city scenery, one of the most annoying factors may be the flow of people. After all, we can't control pedestrians, especially in busy tourist attractions, and a large number of people will interfere with the purity of the picture. At this time, people can be "deleted" from the image by long exposure. Unless someone stays in the same place for dozens of seconds, as long as everyone is moving, it will become translucent and make the main landscape clearer.

When it comes to long exposure, you can't help but mention the optical track. During the time when the shutter is open, the moving track of the light source will be recorded, and the light track can be photographed. Shooting the light track is very simple, even without any expensive filters and equipment. As long as we can control the exposure time and extend the exposure time in the low light environment at night, we can shoot the light trace.

In addition, nature also provides us with its own light source, that is, the stars above us. Because the earth is constantly rotating, when we take pictures of the starry sky for a long time, the stars will also form a track in the air, and it will be a star orbit. Often, the beautiful photos of the star orbit we see are not taken at one exposure, because turning on the sensor for a long time will cause the sensor to heat up and the noise in the image will inevitably increase, so the best way to solve this problem is to take a series of short exposure photos of the star orbit and then synthesize a photo.

Since it is a long exposure, keeping the camera stable has become a top priority. Generally speaking, we will use a tripod to fix the camera. If there is no tripod, you can try to fix the camera in other ways, such as putting the camera on a stable platform.

If we shoot the water in a well-lit environment, such as during the day, even if the aperture sensitivity is minimized, it is difficult to support us to use a longer shutter to expose. At this time, you must use a filter to shoot, which is what we usually call ND filter (neutral gray filter). ND filter is colorless to gray filter, and the ideal medium gray mirror can reduce the brightness of all wavelengths of light. Depending on the gear you want to lower, there are different types of ND filters, such as ND2 lowering exposure by one gear, ND4 lowering exposure by two gears, ND8 lowering exposure by three gears, ND 16 lowering exposure by four gears and so on.