Charles Reace

Fun With Long Exposures

I had a couple opportunities during my recent trip to South Dakota to play around a bit with long exposure shots. In one case, I took some photos of Spearfish Falls with the apperture closed up all the way to f/22, plus I put on a polarizing filter to knock down the light another couple stops. As it was a pretty bright day, this still resulted in a shutter speed of 1/5 second — but I quite liked the results. I'm not really a fan of the super-slow photos of water that make it look like smoke or a milky mist: I want it to still be water.

In a much longer exposure of 30 seconds (at f/7.1), I captured the pre-dawn glow over the South Dakota badlands. A fair amount of tweaking was needed in Lightroom post-processing to bring out some detail in the ground, while still allowing Venus to shine in all her glory before the sun arrived.

Click on either image to see an enlarged view (probably not useful on small devices).

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