Photographing Bands > Part Six

Part Six: Long Exposures ( August 07, 2000 )

   One of the major effects that is used in photographing bands today is long exposures. The idea is to keep the shutter open for longer than usual, and allow more light to saturate the image, and perhaps providing streaks in the photo. It's a pretty cool technique, I've been doing it pretty often over the past few months. So, try it. Set your aperture from anywhere between 8 and 16 and keep the shutter open between 1/8 and 1/2 seconds. The major idea is to keep your camera focused on the subject. Doing this with subjects that are moving a lot is much more effective than ones that are pretty stationary. The more they move, the better the results.

   Another interesting thing you can do is set when your flash goes off. If you have it attached to your camera, the flash will immediately go off, and your image will have an initial image, with some streaking after the flash. If you remove your flash from the mount and snap it manually, you can have streaking, then flashed subject, and then some more streaking, which is also pretty cool, and a little more creative.

   Something else to think about is multiple flash exposures. When you see an image that looks like 2 or more images overlapped, it means the person who took the photo used a long exposure and snapped his/her flash multiple times. You can do this one of many ways. There are 2 that I do. One way is to manually snap your flash a few times during a long exposure. Another is to use 2 different flashes. Mount one on your camera, it will go off when you start the exposure, then manually snap the second flash in your hand, one or more times. This also provides an interesting result because the 2 light sources are coming from different source points. Pretty cool huh?

   It is also a cool thing to try is to photograph bands without a flash. Although it should be pretty well lit, and you should have a pretty fast film ( 800 ISO or more ), you can use long exposures that don't have light from a flash at all.

   Long exposures are often used in band photography, and it's fun to try.