One of my favorite ways of making a unique picture is with a slow shutter speed. Using a long exposure, you can blend colors, make your picture more vibrant, and show movement. Most cameras (as far as I know) don’t let you go very high with your exposure settings. To do this, you need a camera that will let you get at least ten seconds or more, and allow you to manually adjust you ISO and f-stop.

Before you get started, you need to understand how the settings on a camera work. The three settings that affect us right now are the shutter speed, the f-stop, and the ISO settings.

The shutter speed is the simplest of the three. Basically, it’s the time that the shutter is left open while you take a picture. You can set if for anywhere from thousandths of a second to 30 seconds, depending on the type of camera you have. If the shutter is only open a short time, not very much light gets in. If the shutter is open for a long time, lots of light can get in, and the picture is brighter. To make up for these changes in brightness, we can adjust the f-stop and ISO settings.

The f-stop is a ratio of the focal length of a camera over the size of the aperture. It is set up so that a larger number means a smaller opening (or aperture), and therefore less light. A smaller number means a larger opening, and more light. You can match this with the effects of different shutter speeds and ISO settings to reach a balanced picture.

The ISO setting adjusts the sensitivity of the camera’s light sensor. You can set it higher, to get lighter pictures, or lower to get darker ones. ISO settings can range from 80 to 1600 or more, depending on the camera. The problem with ISO settings is that a high ISO setting, such as 800 or above, will often give “noise,” or tiny speckles in pictures. I’ve found this to be a problem with my camera, although it changes depending on the camera.

So now that you understand the settings that allow you to adjust your picture, we can get started with discussing long exposure settings. The idea behind a long exposure is to get the light, or lack thereof, to work for you in a picture. For instance, if you have a one second shutter speed, and you take a picture of a person walking as you pan the camera, their legs blur, implying motion.

Essentially, all you have to do is find something that you believe would look good with a long exposure, such as a stream, or a person walking, or even a still life that needs more vibrant colors, and point your camera at it. You can set the three settings we mentioned above to complement each other, and ensure that the light will come out correctly. Make sure you are holding the camera steady, or that you have a tripod, and then just take the picture. 

Some tips:

1.       Use a tripod – pictures can become very blurry, very quickly, with long exposures, especially when you are zoomed in.

2.       Play with the length of the exposure – sometimes it only takes a short exposure to produce the right effect. You have to match the speed of the action with the length of the exposure.

3.       Use flash – Flash introduces a unique effect because it “stops” the motion for a second. That’s what I used for the pool ball pictures you see here.

4.       Move the camera – if you have a tripod or steady hands, move the camera slowly to get a creative effect in your picture. I used that for the fireworks picture.

5.       Panning – try tracking the object of your photo as you take the picture. If you get it just right, you can make the background blurry but the object sharp, as in the picture of the soldier. It takes work, though!