Adding Subjects to Slow Shutter Shots

Adding subjects to a slow shutter click has given me a number of good shots. Slow shutter shots usually can be taken only at very low light conditions, unless we stack up multiple ND filters and shoot with a pin-like aperture. I usually have this habit of using external lights while clicking slow shutter. But it is not that we can’t add subjects without artificial lighting. And yes, in many cases, the on-camera flash ( perhaps the most hated light source in photo communities) can also give amazing results.

I am sharing two of my photographs, one without the use of any additional lighting equipment and the other only with the on-camera flash. And yes, we’ll see subjects added to the still slow shutter shots discussed in the previous post.

The Mediterranean Sea shot I had shared in the last blog-post was an extremely clichéd photograph . But however clichéd a photo idea may be, you add a face to it and it becomes uniquely distinct from all others. I asked my fellow traveler and author, Sachin Garg to get into the frame, clicked it again, and here I had Sachin shouting wow for the next couple of minutes. The only thing that we need to ensure in such photographs is that the model stays perfectly still throughout the exposure, or else we'll make him look like a ghost!!!

The jetty that I shared had a couple of birds moving around and it made a great photo opportunity.  In such cases, flashes come in handy. Flashes help by exposing the main subject just at the right instant and then the long exposure will make the surroundings and the sky look alright. I used the on-camera flash to freeze the bird (I would have loved to use two wirelessly triggered flash lights in such a situation, the result would have been amazing, but I had none in my bag). I locked my camera on a tripod, set the flash on front-shutter-sync, took manual focus of the jetty where I expected the birds to flutter, waited for them to open the wings, and clicked just as I saw them flutter. I got this after around two dozen attempts of 20 second exposures.

Stay tuned for more on using flash bulbs in the upcoming posts.

 -          The Wandering Viewfinder

Slow Shutter Shooting

Six out of ten times when I am thinking of a composition that is out of the world, dreamy, calm and soothing, it is slow shutter that comes to my mind.

Ya, going high key is an option…but the images can be too dry and shiny to be soothing. Using flashes and other forms of artificial lighting also helps many a times, giving great and extremely dynamic looking photographs, but then pushing up the F-stops makes the images a bit too sharp to be dreamy.

Slow shutter shots are great and have actually no alternative in a variety of cases.

I clicked this in Bled, Slovenia. If you have a water body, and a couple of other subjects fitting nicely into the composition, and it is almost dark or completely dark, then I think let us not talk any further and go slow shutter.

Slow shutter almost always gives amazing results with all water bodies. Ponds and lakes look silky smooth, waterfalls look like the ones in heaven, and seas look like clouds.

This above photograph below was taken in Cassiss (Southern France) sometime in the evening. This is in fact just the right time to click the seas in such a mood. All I did was squeezed the aperture small enough to ensure that the photograph is not overexposed while my shutter remains open for a long time (10 Seconds) , fixed my camera on a tripod and clicked!


The one below is called "Flowing Lava or Urban Chaos". I took it from the top floor of the Eiffel Tower. The long shutter illuminated the beautiful streets of Paris just enough to make them look like molten mass.

And then after all, shooting with a slow shutter is like having a number of huge huge flashbulbs with us, we can light up a city or an entire mountain from tip to toe with it!!!