A Couple Of Long Exposures
I have been away camping with the family for the last couple of days (hence no new photos). Did a bit of playing with long exposure shots and the D90 to see how it would handle… The first one is a 20 minute exposure which has been a bit over tweaked in Photoshop (sorry not quite back in the real world yet) and the second one is a 30 second exposure.
The files look good but I have to say that the camera processing time was crazy! On the first shot the exposure was 20 minutes and it nearly took that long to process the image after the initial exposure so 40 minutes all up. I am hoping I just left a setting on which would increase the processing time so will have to look and see what other people have said…
Nikon D90, 50mm f1.8 Lens, ISO 200
Darkhalide Photography 
I’ve done a bunch of exposures on my D40 in the 15s range and there seems to be a roughly linear relationship to the processing time. I have no answers for you, but I’m instantly put off of shooting long exposures on digital.
18/01/2012 at 19:29
I’m usually the same but “have new toy will play” 🙂 Its good to find out it is most likely the noise reduction kicking in… It will save time for when I start testing more painting with light techniques 🙂
19/01/2012 at 08:51
You both have the Long Exposure Noise Reduction turned on. The cameras takes a second exposure of equal length which it uses to subtract noise from the first one. Turn this off. You can find this setting in the Shooting (film) menu.
18/01/2012 at 20:47
Cheers 🙂 Thats kind of along the lines I was thinking 🙂 Usually I shoot this kind of thing on film which doesn’t have that problem 🙂
19/01/2012 at 08:49
I tried star trails few weeks ago with my Pentax K5, was also turned off by the processing time, now knowing its just a setting I think I might have to try again!
20/01/2012 at 12:52
Same here…Will also help with paint with light project… D70s never had that problem 🙂
22/01/2012 at 07:53
…If your doing long exposures with manual mode, doing test shots to find correct exposure: Crank your iso to its max and use your lowest f number. When you have the correctly exposed hideously noisy, useless depth of field shot, note the shutter speed and do the maths to find out the shutter speed needed for your desired iso and f stop. This saves you shed loadsa time and keeps you in battery power. I learned this the hard way by taking an hour and a half ( 8×10 min exposures) to get one shot correctly exposed. 2 hours shooting using 3 batteries. Yeah.. I take ten min exposures on occasion 🙂
26/05/2012 at 16:15
I find with long exposure shots its pretty hard to overexpose unless the is serious ambient light… I guess after a while it comes down to how long you want to wait.
31/05/2012 at 10:34
Great shot of the tree simon. You really needed to know your earth rotation for that one.
26/05/2012 at 16:17
Sometimes you just get lucky 🙂 Keep meaning to get a compass for my camera bag but never seem to get round to it 🙂
31/05/2012 at 10:30