5 Reasons You Should Learn Long Exposure Photography
Long exposure imagery is an interesting and highly satisfying technique of creating images. It requires you to use the manual mode or sometimes shutter priority mode to control your shutter speed.
Shutter priority mode is marked on Nikon camera with ‘S’ and on Canon systems with ‘Tv’. They mean the exact same thing. When you switch to shutter priority mode you can select the shutter speed while the camera selects the appropriate aperture.
Obviously if you need a bit more flexibility, you should use the manual mode, where both shutter speed and aperture value are in your control. That helps you to maintain a long shutter speed while also controlling the depth of field.
At this point you would probably be asking yourself why you would need to shoot long exposure images. Wouldn’t shooting such exposures risk your images to be washed out? This is because there are some other tools and techniques involved in the process as well. Such as using ND filters or using exposure compensation to find the right aperture / shutter speed combination that allows sufficient light over a long period of time without risking a washed out image.