Long exposure

[veros222]

I got inspired by many beautiful long exposure shots here in the forum and on Flick as well.So I bought the Hoya ND 400 filter and went out today to experiment a bit. I was kinda disappointed after first tries as I wasn't able to get my camera to do an exposure longer than 30 sec. And my question is...how do you adjust that? Am I missing something or is it just my camera settings cannot do any more? Btw I have Canon Rebel 400D. Maybe my question is stupid and the explanation simple...but hey...we all gotta learn somehow. Thanks everyone and have a great day )

[Nicole]

Questions aren't stupid, especially if you don't know where to start looking But, it should be fairly simple. If you put your camera into manual mode and then increase the shutter speed you should be able to go past 30" and to bulb. A search on Google turned up that it should be explained on p. 71 of your manual.

[acedrew]

To really do Long exposure well, you need a remote shutter release. They will help 2 ways, 1. they minimize vibration, so that your shots turn out sharp, 2. they help you get beyond that 30 second mark.
The cheapest of these will offer a "Shutter Button Lockdown" where you will press the button in and slide it into a locked position to keep the shutter open in bulb mode. The nicer ones let you program a specific shutter open time while in bulb mode as well as multiple shots and intervals (think stop motion sunrises). I bought a 3rd party programmable model from dealextreme.com for about $40, it works well, and it has all the features you could ever need, it even provides up to 99 hour exposure times... or 99 hour programmable interval shots. I will say that if you order from dealextreme.com (search for something like "JJC," I think that was the brand name?) expect to wait about a month for shipping.

Andrew Rodgers
Perfected Perspectives -- Photography by Andrew Rodgers | Andrew Rodgers (acedrew) on Twitter

[dcclark]

Let me re-emphasize:

1. Set the shutter speed to "bulb" (sometimes it appears as "--" in the viewfinder). This will let you keep the shutter open for as long as you want.

2. Get a remote shutter release. This will let you open and close the shutter without touching the camera (and introducing shake and blur).

Voila!

[veros222]

Thank you all guys for taking you time to answer my question. I will definitely get the shutter release. I was "playing around" with the filter again yesterday, it took a lot of trial and error experiments... and here are some of the results.

[R lake]

Originally Posted by veros222

Thank you all guys for taking you time to answer my question. I will definitely get the shutter release. I was "playing around" with the filter again yesterday, it took a lot of trial and error experiments... and here are some of the results.

....I just wish you posted larger images, can't see so well and I would like to see them better.

[PowerPix]

Quick question, is the ND 400 filter for use on long exposures without getting everything blown out?

[Samanax]

Originally Posted by PowerPix

Quick question, is the ND 400 filter for use on long exposures without getting everything blown out?

Yes, that's one of it's uses.

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[PowerPix]

Ok, thanks.

[veros222]

Ok, here are the bigger versions. I thought the pic would take you to my flickr page where you coulc see the large size.