Nikon D7000 manual Working with Long Exposures

188 David Busch’s Nikon D7000 Guide to Digital SLR Photography

Figure 7.5

A locking cable release can give you long time exposures, such as this 60 sec- ond shot in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Working with Long Exposures

Because the D7000 produces such good images at longer exposures, and there are so many creative things you can do with long exposure techniques, you’ll want to do some experimenting. Get yourself a tripod or another firm support and take some test shots with long exposure noise reduction both enabled and disabled (to see whether you pre- fer low noise or high detail) and get started. Here are some things to try:

■Make people invisible. One very cool thing about long exposures is that objects that move rapidly enough won’t register at all in a photograph, while the subjects that remain stationary are portrayed in the normal way. That makes it easy to pro- duce people-free landscape photos and architectural photos at night or, even, in full daylight if you use a neutral-density filter (or two) (or three) to allow an exposure of at least a few seconds. At ISO 100, f/22, and a pair of 8X (three-stop) neutral- density filters, you can use exposures of nearly two seconds; overcast days and/or even more neutral-density filtration would work even better if daylight people-van- ishing is your goal. They’ll have to be walking very briskly and across the field of view (rather than directly toward the camera) for this to work. At night, it’s much easier to achieve this effect with the 20- to 30-second exposures that are possible, as you can see in Figure 7.6.

■Create streaks. If you aren’t shooting for total invisibility, long exposures with the camera on a tripod can produce some interesting streaky effects. Even a single 8X ND filter will let you shoot at f/22 and 1/6th second in daylight.