If you’ve found your way to this tutorial, you probably agree with me that long exposure photography is one of the most interesting and enjoyable types of photography. While traditional still photography focuses on capturing a single instant in a photo, long exposure photography allows us to record a longer amount of time in a single image. Aesthetically, long exposure photography can be beautiful — it smoothes and blurs moving objects like clouds, water, people and vehicles, making stationary subjects like rocks, buildings, and bridges stand out. When most photographers begin experimenting with long exposure photography, they begin at night — a time when it’s typically easy to leave the shutter open for several seconds at a time without needing to worry about overexposure.
Daytime long exposure photography has recently skyrocketed in popularity though, and in this tutorial we’ll discuss the techniques that you can use to create stunning daytime long exposure photos.
While short exposures are the norm for daytime photography, long exposures allow us to create images which present reality in our own alternative way. Fast moving objects become essentially invisible and even slow moving elements like a crowd of people can become a ghostly blur if the shutter is left open for long enough. Crashing waves become an ethereal fog, swirling around rocks, and clouds become smooth, painterly streaks across a dark sky.
If photography in general can be summarized as capturing a moment in time, long exposure photography is all about stretching that moment and capturing something more — something that a short exposure just can’t.
Exposure Basics for Daytime Long Exposure Photography
On a bright sunny day, it’s usually easy to use a fast shutter speed. With lots of ambient light in the middle of the day, we might be able to use the exposure settings of 1/400th, f/8, and ISO 100 to freeze the motion of waves rolling onto a rocky shoreline. But what if we wanted to smooth the motion of these waves to create an artistic image? Even using the minimum aperture setting which allows the least light into the lens (often f/22 for most lenses), we won’t be able to use a long enough shutter speed to smooth the water in an appealing way.
To use a longer exposure time, we’ll need to somehow reduce the amount of light that reaches the camera’s sensor. Fortunately the solution is pretty simple. Imagine that you are sitting on the beach on an incredibly bright, sunny day. You fall asleep for a while in the warm sun and when you wake up, the sun is so blinding that you can barely open your eyes. You reach for your pair of dark sunglasses and instantly you can see again — their dark lenses reduce the amount of light that reaches your eyes. For daytime long exposure photography, the camera’s version of sunglasses comes in the form of a neutral density filter, essentially a piece of dark gray glass (or plastic) that blocks a specific amount of light from reaching the sensor, just like sunglasses block a certain amount of light from reaching our eyes.
What You’ll Need for Daytime Long Exposure Photography
While nighttime long exposure photography doesn’t really require anything more than a camera that can shoot long exposures, a tripod, and a shutter release cable, daytime long exposure photography may require a few more items of gear.
A Sturdy Tripod
As with any kind of long exposure photography, a sturdy tripod is one of the most essential things you’ll need. Since the shutter will be left open for a prolonged amount of time, any shaking of the camera will become evident in your photos. Although we want the moving elements in a long exposure photo to be smoothed and blurred, we don’t want the stationary objects like rocks and buildings to be blurry. Long exposure photos that will include the sky in them are often best taken on windy days to get good cloud movement, so a tripod that doesn’t shake in the wind is critical.
Much like cameras and lenses, tripods vary widelyin quality and price. For long exposure photography, avoid the cheap plastic tripods you can buy at the drugstore while on vacation. A good tripod should last for several years and you’re better off starting with a high quality aluminum or carbon fiber tripod. For reducing vibrations, a solid wooden tripod is great — but you probably don’t want to be carrying a heavy chunk of tree around on a long hike.For the budget shooters, tripods like the Slik Sprint Pro II Tripod, Manfrotto 190XPROL, Induro AKB1, and the Oben AT-3400 are all highly rated tripods that can be purchased for less than $300, some for only around $100.
A Camera with Manual Exposure Control
You’ll need a camera that you can control the exposure on manually. Most modern DSLR and mirrorless cameras like the Canon SL1 or Sony A7 should fit the bill perfectly. Some compact cameras like the Ricoh GR can even be used on manual mode, but since we’ll be attaching light blocking filters to the camera lens for daytime long exposure photography, it will be much easier to use a camera and lens combination that has a filter thread for easy attachment.
A Shutter Release Cable
Shutter release cables are a very inexpensive piece of gear that will allow you to shoot exposures longer than the preset maximum of 30 seconds that most DSLR and mirrorless cameras offer. To use a shutter release cable you’ll need to set your camera to the Bulb setting — without a shutter release cable, most cameras require you to hold the shutter button down for as long as you want the exposure to be. Since touching the camera during an exposure causes unwanted vibrations that can ruin a long exposure photo, we’re better off using one of these remote cable releases to trigger the shutter. The shutter release should feature a locking mechanism so that you don’t need to physically hold the button down during the exposure.
For more advanced control, you can purchase an intervalometer which will allow you to set a specific exposure time as well as the number of exposures and the interval between each. For shooting time lapse photography, these are exceptionally useful, but for long exposure photography they’re not necessary if you’ve got a watch or cell phone to keep track of your exposure time. With some photography gear, the cheap off-brand versions that are typically shipped from China are best avoided — when it comes to shutter release cables though, I’ve had great success with the affordable versions like this one made by a company called Pixel.
A Neutral Density (ND) Filter
While a neutral density filter is an optional, and often unnecessary, accessory for nighttime long exposure photography, it’s a must-have for daytime shooting. An ND filter is basically just a dark piece of glass or plastic (often referred to as resin by the manufacturers) which reduces the amount of light that passes through the lens and reaches the camera’s sensor.
ND filters come in a variety of strengths, sizes, and even formats.
While low strength ND filters can be used to block just a stop or two of light, for daytime long exposure photography you will typically use fairly strong neutral density filters such as 9 and 10 stop filters, also referred to as ND400 and ND1000 filters. An ND400 filter like this one from Hoya reduces the light by 8 2/3 stops (the manufacturers round to 9 and call it a 9 stop ND filter) — this filter reduces the intensity of the light to just 1/400th of its original strength. An ND 1000 filter or 10 stop ND filter like this one from B+W reduces the light even more to just 1/1000th of its original strength, blocking out 99.9% of the light. A “stop” reduces the light by half, so a 3 stop ND filter allows in just 1/2 the light that a 2 stop ND filter does. A 4 stop ND filter allows in only half the light that a 3 stop ND would allow, and so on.
To give you an example of just how an ND filter helps, imagine that you’re trying to photograph a scene in reasonably bright conditions. Without any filter, your exposure time is 1/250. A 3 stop filter would allow you to increase your exposure time to 1/30….slower, but not really slow enough to smooth movement in an aesthetically pleasing way. A 6 stop ND filter will let you increase your exposure time to 1/4 second — enough to see some smoothing of moving objects like water, but perhaps not as much as we’d like. With a 10 stop ND filter, we’re able to use a much longer 4 second exposure — long enough to get some nice smoothing effects for some elements like water, but probably not enough to smooth the movement of clouds. Add a second 10 stop ND filter on top of that 10 stop ND and now we’ve got a 20 stop reduction in light, meaning that our 4 second exposure time can increase to a whopping onehour+ long exposure.
As you’ve probably noticed in your photography learning experience it sometimes seems like everyone is just out to confuse you. ND filters are unfortunately one of those confusing things and it can be pretty easy to buy the wrong strength of filter if you’re not careful. Some ND filter makers refer to the filter’s F-Stop reduction factor, calling a filter a 10 stop ND Filter. Others refer to the same strength of filter as an ND1000, referring to the filter factor (which is actually 1024, they just round down). Others might call this same filter an ND 3.0, referring to the optical density. This can get confusing, since an ND 3.0 filter is not at all the same thing as a 3 Stop ND filter.
Choosing a FilterFormat
As if picking the right strength of ND filter wasn’t enough of a challenge, you’ll also be presented with the choice of format: screw on ND filters or slide-in square filters. Screw-on filters are going to be the most familiar; they simply screw onto your lens just like a UV or circular polarizer filter, allowing you to use a lens hood like you normally would to reduce lens flare in your images. One of the big downsides to these circular screw on ND filters is that they are time consuming to screw on and off of your lens. It can be pretty easy to accidentally drop your ND filter while you’re unscrewing it. If you’ve got multiple lenses with different filter thread sizes, you’ll also need to purchase step up rings to adapt the filter to your others lenses. If you’ve got an ND filter that’s smaller than your other lenses’ filter threads, you can also purchase step down rings, but if you have the option it’s always best to purchase a filter for your lens with the largest filter diameter — using a smaller filter on a larger lens might mean that the filter will cause very unattractive vignetting in your photos.
Square/rectangular filters require a filter holder like the co*kin P or co*kin Z filter holder or Lee filter holder, which slides onto a filter adapter ring attached to your lens. With the filter holder attached, it’s easy to change the square filters, sliding them into the filter holder. Stacking filters is also simple with this format and it makes the most sense when using graduated neutral density filters which we’ll cover next. While you won’t be able to use your lens’s normal hood while using these square filter holders, you can purchase hoods that are designed to fit these filter systems; a good idea especially for daytime long exposure photography.
Graduated Neutral Density Filters are the tool of choice when you don’t need to reduce the brightness of every part of your scene. As their name suggests, these filters have a gradual distribution of darkness, with one half of the filter being darker and the other half being transparent, with a gradual area in between. These filters are especially useful for shooting long exposure images with the sky in them — an example might be at the beach during sunset: As the sun is setting, the water in the foreground is dark with the light source so close to the horizon. The sky is still very bright however, so to shoot a properly exposed long exposure photo, we want to block some of the light in the sky without blocking it from the water. A graduated neutral density filter or Grad ND does the trick, allowing us to selectively darken part of the scene. While these filters come in the circular variety, you’ll have the most flexibility with square graduated neutral density filters which will let you position the darker part of the filter where you want it, rather than directly in the middle of the lens.
In your search for an ND filter, you may come across variable neutral density filters like this one from B+W. Essentially, a variable ND filter is composed of two stacked polarizing filters with one of them being able to rotate, reducing the light as the filters approach a perpendicular position. For lower strengths of light reduction, these variable neutral density filters can work well, but the closer you get to their maximum strength the more noticeable vignetting issues will become. While many variable filters claim a range up to 8 to 10 stops of light reduction, you’re usually not going to get usable results at these maximum settings with most lenses.
The biggest downside to ND filters is their price. For a tiny piece of dark glass, these things are expensive.The current crowd favorite, the Lee Big Stopper 10 stop ND filter, retails for over $200, plus you’ll need a filter holder which adds on about another $100. A circular B+W 77mm 10 stop ND filter will set you back quite a bit as well. If you want to buy a variety of strengths and some graduated neutral density filters, you’re looking at a pretty hefty investment — worthwhile if long exposure photography is your passion, but a little scary if you’re a novice.
At this point, the budget shoppers will begin searching on eBay and Amazon and finding that you can in fact buy ND filters for just a few dollars, typically shipped from China. So…do these bargain filters work? The short answer is yes, they do work at reducing the light. The slightly longer answer is, you usually get what you pay for when it comes to optics and filters. The cheaper the filter, the lower the manufacturing standards typically are. If your filter is defective in some way, you’re not going to find much customer support for a product that doesn’t even have a brand name stamped on it. With that said, I’ve experimented with some of the more affordable filters and have found that the circular glass ND filters made by “Ice” like this 10 stop ND filter to be of pretty high quality considering the relatively low price. Your mileage may vary, and for the most reliable results, there is a reason why brands like Lee, B+W, and Hoya enjoy a large share of the market despite being rather pricey.
A Circular Polarizer
Depending upon what you’re photographing, you may want to add a polarizing filter to your lens. This filter will help increase color saturation and contrast, reduce reflections on glass and water, and block 1 to 2 stops of light, allowing you to use a slightly longer exposure time. You can stack an ND filter and a polarizing filter to get the benefits of both, for instance when photographing a waterfall during the day. The Neutral Density filter will allow you to keep the shutter open for longer, smoothing the flow of the water in your photo, and the polarizer will cut the reflections on the water’s surface.
Shooting Daytime Long Exposure Photography
Set your tripod up in the most stable place possible. If I’m photographing on a rocky beach, whenever possible I will place the tripod legs on rocks, rather than on the sand. Even a small amount of water washing over the sand your tripod legs are resting on can shift the position of your tripod by a millimeter or two and ruin your shot. Unless I really need the extra height, I usually don’t extend my tripod’s center column when shooting long exposure photography — the further away from the stable legs that your camera gets, the more vulnerable it will be to slight vibrations. If I’m shooting along the coast, I usually keep my hands hovering within a few inches of the tripod if there is any risk of waves. I’ve had large waves come from seemingly out of nowhere, and being able to grab your camera and tripod and lift it up and out of harm’s way is important.
Preventing Light Leaks
While it’s not obvious when you’re shooting normal, short exposures, many cameras — even the most expensive professional DSLRs have a noticeable light leak at the viewfinder. Some cameras provide a little door that you can slide shut covering the viewfinder, while others include a viewfinder cover on the neck strap. If your camera doesn’t have a built-in method for dealing with light leaks, a simple piece of gaffer or electricaltape makes for an easy way to cover up the viewfinder.
Shoot in RAW
99.9% of the time, I shoot in RAW. When you take a photo that’s recorded as a RAW file, the camera’s sensor data is preserved in the file without any of the camera’s processing algorithms applied to it. When you take a JPEG photo, the camera applies it’s processing algorithms and discards the data it didn’t use. Most modern digital cameras do a pretty good job of processing these JPEG files, but your computer is much more powerful and you’ll be able to better process the RAW files yourself.
Because a RAW file preserves all of the light information and a higher dynamic range from the sensor in an uncompressed file, you are able to recover more details from dark shadows and bright highlights than you would be able to with only a JPEG file.With a long exposure photograph, being able to process the image yourself is very important — long exposures can introduce unwanted color casts to a photo from light sources that might not be visible to the naked eye and from ND filters that can change the colors in a long exposure. Shooting and processing RAW will allow you to modify the color temperature of your image without losing any quality in the image.
Long exposures, even those taken during the day, can also introduce digital noise into your images which is easy to minimize during RAW processing.While shooting in RAW is the best choice for serious photographers, the files created are significantly larger than JPEG images — be sure to bring a large enough memory card.
Long Exposure Noise Reduction
Most DSLR cameras will have an optional setting that allows you to reduce the digital noise when shooting long exposure photography. Long exposure noise reduction takes a second dark frame after your first, initial exposure has completed and uses this dark exposure to remove hot pixel noise. Because long exposures can cause your camera to heat up, and this heat increases the digital noise recorded by your sensor, using this noise reduction option can be very helpful — the downside to it is that it essentially doubles your exposure time. If you shoot a 2 minute long exposure, the second dark exposure will also take a further two minutes, meaning you won’t be able to shoot another shot for 4 minutes. Not a big deal at night or in the middle of the day if you aren’t in a rush, but if you’re photographing at sunrise or sunset when the lighting conditions can change a great deal in just a short period of time, you might be better off not using the long exposure noise reduction option.
Composing your Shot
If you’re using a very dark ND filter like an 8, 9 or 10 stop filter, composing your photo using the viewfinder is going to be pretty tricky since you’ll barely be able to see anything. The easiest solution is to compose your shot and set the focus before you attach the ND filter to your lens. Of course, this is time consuming, especially if you’re using a circular screw-on ND filter and have to carefully attach it to the filter threads on your lens. If your camera has live view, you may be able to use a quicker work-around to bypass this issue. Using live view and the exposure simulation preview, you may be able to digitally zoom in on a selective area of your scene to manually set the focus. However you compose your shots, make sure you set the focus for your lens to manual — nothing is more bothersome than going through the trouble of carefully focusing your shot, only to press the shutter and realize it’s still set to autofocus, forcing you to re-focus your shot.
Picking a Subject & Time of Day
Daytime long exposure photography techniques can be used to photograph just about anything, but certain subjects are especially well-suited. Including a moving element like water, clouds, or a crowd of people walking will make for a compelling shot. If you live near the ocean or a lake, find the nearest pier — these make for beautiful subjects, especially at sunrise and sunset. Quickly flowing rivers and streams are excellent subjects too — try to find an interesting subject like rocks in the water to build your composition around. If you’ve got some very strong ND filters, give daytime architecture photography a try. You’ll find that you’ll usually get the best results on a windy day with at least some clouds in the sky to add some smooth motion behind the buildings.
With a strong enough neutral density filter, you can shoot long exposures at any time of day. Personally, I usually prefer the early morning around sunrise and the evening around sunset for much of my daytime long exposure shooting. The late afternoon and middle of the day can cause harsh shadows if you’re shooting landscapes and seascapes on a bright, sunny day. Take some notes when you head out shooting about the lighting conditions, and you’ll soon develop your own personal preferences.
Proper Exposure
Experiment with a variety of exposure times — the longest possible time is not always going to make for the best shot; sometimes being able to see a bit of definition in a wave is a good thing. As with any type of photography, you should typically use the lowest ISO setting available to you. On most cameras the base ISO will be 100. As for the aperture setting, itmay be preferable to usetwo ND filters in conjunction to achieve a longer exposure time, rather than simply using a smaller aperture since a smaller aperture has the side-effect of increasing the depth of field as well.
For long exposure times of more than 30 seconds in bright sunlight, you will likely need to use more than just one strong ND filter. For capturing the movement of clouds across the sky in a scene, exposure times of severalminutes may be needed to obtain desirable results. Stacking two filters like a Hoya ND1000 and a Hoya ND400 will give you a reduction of 18 stops, enough to achieve an exposure of several minutes even in bright lighting conditions.
Learn More!
If you want to keep learning more about long exposure photography, be sure to check out these tutorials as well:
Long Exposure Photography Tips
Long Exposure Photography Examples and Settings
Northern Lights Photography Guide
Lightning Photography Tutorial
Star Photography Tutorial
Fireworks Photography Tutorial
