Rodney Campbell's Blog

Using a slow shutter (long exposure) is one of my favoured photographic techniques.

I’m often thinking about how I can incorporate slow shutter into my imagery. It has a distinctive look and simplification of the scene that I really find appealing.

Cloud Dreaming

NIKON D750 + 24.0-70.0 mm f/2.8 @ 26 mm, 51 sec at f/9, ISO 100

As is usual 🙂 for my friend Gerry, he sent me a late night invite to join him for a sunrise session the next morning. Interestingly the planning for this actually didn’t take much longer than 5 minutes (normally there’s a flow back and forth of failed suggestions before eventually locking something in). Perhaps I was just tired – I caved immediately and just said yes to the first suggestion :).

So we met around 5:15AM at Mahon pool at Maroubra, in Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs.

Sunrise wasn’t till 6:06AM this morning so even starting shooting at around 5:30AM we had some time for some natural long exposures before twilight really kicked in.

Note: These photographs (especially the wider shots) look much better when larger. To see larger versions in an inline overlay slideshow gallery viewer click any of the images.

Awash

NIKON D750 + 24.0-70.0 mm f/2.8 @ 36 mm, 10 sec at f/11, ISO 100

The slow shutter technique is something I can turn to when things aren’t totally working for me otherwise.

I took two images from essentially the same spot with roughly the same composition only minutes apart.

The first image is a simple natural exposure with a Polariser and 3 stop hard grad filter. It’s technically still a slow shutter (10 seconds) but personally I don’t call it a long exposure till I get to bulb mode (> 30 seconds) :).

Lavender Sweets

NIKON D750 + 24.0-70.0 mm f/2.8 @ 35 mm, 255 sec at f/11, ISO 200

To see the difference slowing the shutter right down can make I’ve added a Lee LittleStopper (a 6 stop ND) to really extend the exposure time. I had to bump the ISO a little so it wasn’t too insanely long (especially since I generally just wing my exposure times in bulb mode as I’m going along). Anyway 255 seconds later we have this variant with a very different feel to the scene.

NIKON D750 + 24.0-70.0 mm f/2.8 @ 56 mm, 276 sec at f/11, ISO 100

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