photography question

dansher

greetings,

iv just bought my first DSLR (canon eos 550d) and iv been trying to work out how to do those long exposure shots, the kind where you get the ghosting/blurring effect when people walk and stuff. i'v tried changing the shutter speed but that just lets to much light in and you cant see anything. i have managed to do it before i think with my old camera but i have no idea how i did it lol,

thanks for any info,
Dan

Rwolf

I imagine you would hafta set it so the shutter stay's open as long as you hold down the trigger.

I know I did with my old 35mm SLR

Nm was thinking of nightshot. Have you tried experimenting with high F-stops?

dansher

no, what are they?

im very much a noob when it comes to photography lol

Paul Pepera

- Use slow speed ISO
- Use a small aperture setting (f/22 or f/32)
- Use neutral density filters

Ultimately you need to educate yourself on exposure and how shutter speeds, apertures, ISOs, filters, etc all relate to how much light hits the sensor/film, as well as other implications such as depth of field. Once you wrap your head around this stuff determining correct exposures for a desired artistic effect is actually quite simple. This is one of the best books on the subject: [ame=http://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Exposure-3rd-Photographs-Camera/dp/0817439390/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1306572202&sr=8-1]Understanding Exposure[/ame]

danr

you'll need an ND (neutral density) filter to do this sort of thing in daylight. Basically knocks down the amount of light hitting the sensor, you can get different grades of filter or even stack them to remove more and more light. Try holding a pair of sunglasses over the lens first to see a (very) rough idea of the effect first.

You may just get away with the tiniest aperture f22 and lowest iso setting (does the 550d go down to 50? Maybe called 'L'?) for slightly-longer-than-usual exposures but you're pretty much always going to over expose and be too bright in the dsytime without a filter

oh, and you'll want a tripod or something solid to put your camera on too

(edit. Yeah. What he said)

Lamont

And use a remote or timer function to fire the shutter.

dansher

thanks heaps everyone, ill buy an ND filter tomorrow and start playing lol and im checking out that book now might head to the library tomorrow see if they have it

@ danr, lowest ISO speed on the 550d is 100

EarthQuake

The easiest way to do this is to set your camera into Shutter Prority(TV) mode on the mode dial, then you can set your desired shutter speed with the dial. You may also want to use TV to help you get the right settings, and then go to M and set your Shutter and Aperture settings manually to fine tweak it.

As others have noted you will/may need to:
1. Use a tripod, or for shots faster than 1 second, ie 1/6th, you may be able to use a monopod.
2. Use a wireless shutter release or just use the timed shutter release function
3. Use a ND filter to avoid overexposed images
4. Use a circular polarizer for taking shots of water/waterfalls/etc, generally you can get an inexpensive kit with a ND, CP, and UV filter. Dont waste your money buying $100 filters.
5. Shoot in TV/M mode
6. You can probably afford to overexpose 1 stop and then recover via raw. Generally underexposing is a better idea than overexposing, however in this case its probably safe to do one stop. Possibly even two stops on your 550D, you should experiment with this. Once you clip white in raw there is no going back, so keep that in mind.
7. Experiment with a wide variety of shutter speeds. Depending on what you're doing, you may not need a very long shutter speed at all.

ND filters can be good to use even if its not full on daylight, just because these long exposures may require a f-stop of 22 or 32 or something very small. A lens starts to lose sharpness on a crop camera like yours past F8, so you should avoid shooting at apertures lower(high number) than that if you can help it. This is because of... diffusion(is that the right word? feel like it isn't), basically at some point (around F8 for crop and F11 for fullframe) the benefits of stopping down a lens to increase sharpness no longer apply, and you will lose sharpness instead. There is a bunch of math and theory to explain this but it isn't essential to understand, the simple comparison is that using really small apertures is akin to looking through a screened in window.

ND filters are also good for standard photography, if you want to say; shoot wide open or close to with a fast lens on a bright sunny day, to get the nice bokeh effect but do not want to over expose.

Firebert

^
Somebody just totally nerded out.

dansher

nerding out is a good thing lol

thanks heaps earthwuake, just got my new filter then so ill be doing a bit of playing around, ill post some experiment shots when i have them