I love a long exposure photography you know that and to create most of those
dreamy and surreal images that I like to take I use nd filters but today we are
going to see how to take longe exposure photos without any filters we will
also check out a very interesting tool that might speed up our Lightroom
editing workflow which is this one so a lot to talk about stay here
relax intro
welcome to my channel here we talk about photography and I make
videos just like this one where I share some long exposure tips so if you're
here for the very first time it might be a good idea to subscribe a couple of
weeks ago I made a video about the gear that you need to start with long
exposure photography five things then I received a bunch of questions from
people that did want to start long exposure photography but didn't want to
invest any money in new gear right away if you are one of them clearly these
video is for you yes as I mentioned before it is possible to take long exposure
photos without using any filter and in this video we are going to see how the
very first thing that I want to talk about are the pros and the cons of not
using nd filters yes you got it right there are also some advantages in not
using nd filters and the biggest one is that without any filter your images will
be possibly much cleaner because the more pieces of glass you will put in
front of your lens the higher will be the risk to create noise in your images
especially at the beginning if you buy some cheaper nd filters which is what I
did when I started I bought on Amazon very cheap screw on variable ND filter my
images were suffering quite a bit and another advantage is that you will have
a lot less to carry with you in this pouch I have all my filters the filter
holder the lens adapters the remote shadow release
it's a lot to carry and I also need to carry a cleaning kit cleaning pens and
the last advantage is that you will be able to keep quite some money in your
pocket as a matter of fact this pouch precisely the contents of this pouch are
well over $1000 and if it is true that there are less expensive kits which I
will link down below in the description and that you will not need to buy
everything right away if you want to have quality filters those are not
inexpensive but of course there are some limitations in not using ND filters and
the very first problem is timing in order to be able to take long exposure
photography without any filters you will need to have a very limited amount of
ambient light available and this usually happens during the blue hour 30 to 40
minutes before sunrise 30 to 40 minutes after sunset, a pretty limited window
of time the second problems that is related to control meaning that if you
want to increase or decrease the length of your exposure you will be limited to
work with ISO and with aperture and we will see how in just a second in order
to understand how we can control the exposure length in long exposure
photography without using any filter we will use some of my shots
I know you might be tired to hear the last year I was in New Zealand but also
these shots come from that trip so be patient so I am in Auckland there is a
beautiful skyline and my idea is to take a long exposure cityscape I imagine a
frontal view so I Drive across the bay and I reach this beautiful point of view
which is a Stanley point I don't have a lot of time the Sun is about to set and
I cannot find a way down to the water I also send up my drone to explore the
scene
I still take some photos but I'm not too happy with the composition I really
wanted to be closer to the water the sun's come down fast so I don't have
a lot of time to find a new composition the only thing I can think of is to use
the Auckland Harbour Bridge in my composition so I rush back I find a way
down to the water by the time I set my tripod the Sun is gone we are in full
blue hour so I don't need to use any ND filters so let's move to Lightroom check
out my shots and see how we can control the exposure length using ISO and
aperture so the very first image here is as you can see it seems really bright
but it's not as a matter of fact I'm using f/1,8 which I do not
recommend for landscape photography or for cityscape photography as a matter of
fact you can see that with these aperture my depth of field is very
shallow the skyline is completely out of focus the reason why I did this is
because I wanted to see through the camera what the scene looked like
because you will see there is a lot darker than this so with ISO 64 f/1.8 my
base shutter speed is one tenth of a second now I switch my aperture to f/8
increase the ISO to 100 so the length of my exposure is extended to one second
and with one second we can already see a little bit of movement in the water so
the water is becoming a little silkier the skyline is a little sharper and you
will notice that with f/8 I have beautiful starts on those lights on the
bridge in the next exposure you can see that with the ISO 100
f/8 and 30 seconds first of all the scene got a lot darker because of course after
sunset gets darker very fast but you can see that with 30 seconds my water
becomes silkier and silkier smoother and smoother you can see that this shot is
super dark my histogram is all positioned to the left we can do better
than this so I take another shot and here increased my ISO up to 200 and of
course it's brighter the histogram moved to the right a little more so this image
for sure is a cleaner image and this will be the image that we will edit
right after so to sum up what you just saw if you want to increase the length
of your exposure you can decrease the ISO or close the aperture basically
moving from f/8 to a f/11 or f/16 so making less light go through your lens
vice-versa if you want to decrease the length of your exposure you will need
more light in you can increase the ISO to a limit because you don't want too
much noise in your photo so maybe to an an ISO 100 you will move to 200 or 400 and
you can open your aperture a little more moving to a wider f-stop just be careful
and avoid to go too wide because as you saw if you use a very wide aperture your
depth of field will be compromised now let's talk about something new let's
talk about this Lightroom console it was sent me by loop deck so that I could
check how this work and I'm very curious to try it out to see if this console
will be faster than using my keyboard and my mouse and in the end if I can be
more effective and speed up my workflow the main advantage of a console like
this is that instead of hovering with your mouse
to all the different panels and move the slider pointing with your mice
left or right here you will have a dedicated knob to every single
adjustment it is pretty cool I need to try it out so I want to edit this photo
with this Loupedeck plus console let's see how I like it
so this was the very first image that I edited completely with the Loupedeck Plus
of course there is a learning curve at the beginning but I have to say that is
very cool to control every single slider with the knob I think that I have in the
end more control so it's definitely a lot easier to make micro adjustments
with the knobs at the same time possibly because I didn't use this console for a
long time it's still faster for me sometimes to go
and search the shortcut key on the keyboard so I can see that with time I
will be able to speed up my editing process quite a bit so thanks to Loupedeck
for sending me this product I always appreciate the possibility to try
a new gear new tools especially when they aim to increase my productivity and
with this we are done for today I hope you enjoyed this video I hope you
learned something new let me know your thoughts in the comments hit the like
button if you did like this video maybe share it with your friends and if you
didn't subscribe yet maybe this is the right time to do so thanks for watching
and I will see you in the next video!