One of the great things about summer is that it gives you more time and ideal conditions to take photos. With Canon EOS cameras, you can try out new techniques such as long exposures and time lapse.

Long exposures

Photographing scenes of activity at night using a shutter speed of several seconds creates light trails across your image. It could be moving cars or a city scene. If the lights are not moving, such as illuminated advertising hoardings, consider moving your camera to create the trails. Set your EOS to manual exposure, where you select the shutter speed and the aperture. You can shoot with different apertures to control the brightness of the foreground and background. Take a look at the captured image on the LCD screen to judge the result.

For star trails, aim your camera at the sky on a clear night. Shoot with an exposure time of several minutes. The apparent motion of the stars across the sky will create curved trails of light. You will need to set your EOS to manual exposure and the shutter speed to bulb, which keeps the shutter open for as long as you hold the shutter button down. A remote switch allows you to lock the shutter open without having to keep the shutter button depressed.

You can write words in the air using a bright torch or a handheld firework sparkler. Shoot outdoors at night against a dark background. Open the camera shutter while someone forms letters in the air with the light. Experiment with different lens apertures so that the light source is not overexposed. One variation is to fire the flash at the start of the exposure so that the person writing the words is visible. The length of the exposure needs to be sufficient for the words to be formed.

Removing people

One special long exposure technique acts like magic to clear a scene of moving people. You need a high-density neutral density filter which attaches to the screw mount at the front of your lens. The filter greatly reduces the amount of light passing through to the lens. This means that you must increase the exposure time for enough light to reach the digital sensor.

Canon offers two versions, the ND4X-L and ND8X-L, which cut the amount of light reaching the sensor by a factor of four and eight respectively. With an exposure time of, say, two minutes in daylight, any moving person in the shot will disappear as they will not be in one place long enough for an image to form.

Handheld blur

If you do not have a tripod, you can still experiment with long exposures. Photograph illuminations at night while deliberately moving the camera up and down or side to side. An exposure time of just a few seconds will give a heavily blurred image that is almost abstract in nature. It is not an effect everyone will appreciate, but can be fun to shoot. Review the images on the camera’s LCD screen and adjust the exposure time, lens aperture and movement to improve results.

This can be a very effective technique when shooting moving water, which becomes a blur against the static surroundings. Try this with running streams, waterfalls or waves on a beach. Fields of wheat are also a good subject – corn blowing in the wind will be blurred by an exposure time of a few seconds while the rest of the landscape remains sharp. Neutral density filters can be used to increase exposure length.

Time-lapse photography

To create a time-lapse movie you need to shoot still images at intervals of anything from a second or two to a day or two. These images are combined and played back at 24 to 30 frames per second. If you shoot a city landscape every minute from two hours before sunset to two hours after, then play it at 24 frames per second, you have 10 seconds of movie showing night falling and the city lights appearing.

Some time-lapse sequences are taken over much longer periods and can show, for instance, the construction of a building in a movie sequence lasting only a few minutes.

How is this done? First you need to fix your camera to a solid support for the period of the shoot. This is not too difficult if your time window is only a few minutes, or even a few hours, although you do need to protect the camera against knocks or other movement. If you are shooting over a period of weeks or months, you need a vantage point that is stable and secure, or a system that allows you to return with the camera and lock it into exactly the same position for each exposure.

For your first time-lapse movie, choose a subject you can shoot over a period of no more than 30 minutes. This will enable you to test the procedure in a short space of time. A busy road junction is a good subject. If possible, shoot with aperture-priority AE (AV) mode so that only the shutter speed changes between exposures. This will maintain a constant depth of field. It is a good idea to focus the camera manually so that the focus does not change between shots. Shoot with a JPEG quality setting, leaving the camera to process the image files.

Next, decide the interval between each shot. Every minute for 30 minutes will give you just over a second of movie, which is not enough. If you want 10 seconds of movie you need around 300 images, which is 10 every minute, or a shot every six seconds. Short intervals give a smoother movie than long intervals.

If you do not want to be standing at the camera with a stopwatch taking a picture every few seconds then the timer remote controller TC-80N3 plugs into many EOS cameras and fires the shutter at preset intervals.

Once you have your shots, you will need to convert them into a time-lapse movie. Upload the images to your computer, then launch Movie Maker (PC) or iMovie (Mac) and follow the instructions.

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