Creating a Long Exposure

I photograph extensively with a Pentax which I use mainly for my landscapes and studio. I also use my Olympus OMD10 mkII as a grab camera particularly useful for street photography. However, I had an opportunity to visit Burton upon Trent this week and stayed at a hotel near to the bridge that crosses the Trent into the town. Though seemingly unremarkable it does have a weir and a very small race with water cascading around several boulders. I decided to get up early in the morning to catch a possible sunrise that could turn an OK scene into something a bit more special. I chose to take my grab camera as I needed to work quickly in order to be on my way for an early morning appointment elsewhere. The sunrise wasn’t quite the fiery spectacular sky normally prayed for but that’s the way with this photography lark. At least I managed to get out there to click a few pictures. I didn’t have any ND Lee filters with me but really wanted to achieve a long exposure. I needed to work quickly and set my camera to aperture priority and with an f20 aperture managed to push the exposure to 5 sec. In the previous shot I managed to push the exposure to 8 sec. but I don’t think the composition was as good as this shot. The light turned from being too dark to capture anything very quickly becoming too light to get the effect I wanted in a matter of minutes. The shot below is the best that I managed which isn’t quite as good as I wanted. When I got back to the hotel I realised that in my haste I totally forgot to reset my ISO. The shot was taken with an ISO of 400 from a previous outing and had I thought about it and set it to 100 I could have possibly stretched the exposure a bit longer but heigh-ho, something to remember next time.

The boulder Race

Taken straight after the image above but because I was facing away from the rising sun manged to get the exposure to 13 sec. at f20 but the trees really spoil the shot, it could have been a more interesting shot otherwise.