Urban Photography – Long Exposures

This exposure was pure luck.

I had just put my tripod away (at the request of a private security guard) but still wanted to get some relatively long exposures (around 1 second) of the waterfall through the archway of this fountain. Using the best hand-held technique I've learned (see Joe McNally's Da Grip video for a great lesson on this) I set the aperture to f/22 and started taking exposures in burst mode. Out of the ten or so that I took only two were sharp enough to display. Like I said, pure luck.

Looking Through the Arch
Copyright 2009 Jeff Lynch Photography
Shot taken with a Canon EOS 50D hand-held, EF 24-105mm f/4 L IS USM at 50mm, f/22 for 1/2 second at ISO 100 on SanDisk digital film. Post capture processing was done in Lightroom, Photoshop Elements and finished in Noise Ninja. Click on the image above for a larger version.

Normally, this type of shot is taken with the camera tripod mounted using a 5 - 8 stop neutral density filter like the Singh-Ray Mor-Slo or Vari-ND. It also helps to take these shots in the early morning, late afternoon or on cloudy days so that you can use an aperture like f/9.5 or f/11 rather than f/22 where the very small aperture can cause sharpness issues due to diffraction. Singh-Ray filters are not cheap but they work very well for long exposure work.

Posted in Photography Tagged: Canon, Canon 50D, Urban Photography