Long exposure portraits

How to Shoot Long Exposure Portraits (Creative Portraits)

By Chad Verzosa

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If you feel like you need to switch up your photography, then you need to try long exposure portraits. With this technique, you get to create dream-like effects. We’ll show you how to do it step-by-step.

Photo by Dom Hill on Unsplash

Step 1: Use the Right Equipment

For any type of photography that requires long exposures, you’ll need three key pieces of equipment to ensure the best results.

Tripod

Long exposure tends to record movement as blurs. That includes the subtle movements you introduce to the camera when you touch it. To keep it stable, you’ll need a tripod to minimize the camera shake.

Remote

Even subtle movements like triggering the shutter with your fingers can cause the camera to shake. So if you don’t want unintentional blurry images, it would be best to use a remote control. When paired with a tripod, your remote will ensure that you’ll have almost zero camera shake.

Lighting

A good light source is crucial for shooting long exposure portraits. The main options you’ll have are continuous lights which include LEDs, light bulbs, and strobes. Don’t worry if you don’t have any professional lighting gear. Even a phone screen or a table lamp will do.

Photo by Manav Sharma from Pexels

Step 2: Choose a Dark Location

Now that you have the equipment you need, you’ll need to find a good location for your photo shoot.

In long exposure photography, too much light can be bad. Since your aperture stays open for a long time, you may end up with overexposed images if you don’t have control over the intensity of your light source. A great solution is to find a completely dark location. That way you don’t have to worry about random light streaks that may appear in your pictures.

It is best to find a place without windows. If your room has windows, wait for the evening to come. Set up thick curtains to make sure street lights don’t shine through into the image.

Step 3: Pick Your Light Source

There are tons of light sources you can use for long exposure portraits. We’ll show you a few options.

Lamps

These are the perfect light source to use if you don’t have any professional equipment. The good news is they work just as well as more expensive options when it comes to long exposure portraits. The downside is that you’ll need to turn them on and off manually as you’re shooting.

Strobes

These are the most consistent light sources to use for long exposure photography. Since the flash only lasts for a fraction of a second, you don’t have to worry about turning it on and off. The only downside is that they’re more expensive than lamps. But even one flashgun is enough to let you create beautiful images.

You’ll also need a remote trigger to use the strobes. That way you can position it anywhere, and it will go off wirelessly when you press the shutter.

Flashlights

What makes flashlights perfect is that you can carry them around and turn them on and off quicker than lamps. You can use it to direct beams at specific spots and create light painting (more on this later). Feel free to combine flashlights or other portable light sources and regular lamps if you want to create cool effects.

Step 4: Set Up Your Lights

There are many ways to set up your lights, depending on what you want to achieve. Generally, you would need to have a key light which is your main light source.

The best position for a key light is about 45 degrees from your subject. Of course, you can change your setup any way you like, but that’s the best angle to start since it provides pleasing light on the subject. One thing you need to avoid is lighting your subject head-on. Doing so will create a flat, shadowless image.

Once your key light is set up, you can now start adding other lights. Feel free to experiment and place them in different positions. For instance, you can light them from the back, the other side opposite the key light, or from above.

Photo by Javi Hoffens on Unsplash

Step 5: Dial Your Settings

Long exposure photography involves a lot of trial and error. That’s why it’s best to use Manual Mode to let you change the settings freely.

The first setting in Manual Mode you’ll need to adjust is the aperture. Select the widest f/stop on your lens so that your camera can gather plenty of light even in a dark room.

Your lens will have a difficult time focusing automatically in the dark. To make sure your subject stays sharp, switch to manual focusing and adjust your lens’s focusing ring yourself.

Before you take a photo, turn on the lights and have your subject stand in front of the camera. Now focus your lens manually then turn off the lights. Even though you can’t see your model anymore, you can be sure that they’ll be sharp because your lens is already set.

The next parameter to change is the shutter speeds. Since it’s dark, you can start with 4 seconds and go either faster or slower depending on the amount of light your camera captures.

Remember that the settings may change when you finally introduce lights to your set. Even though you’ll only turn them on for a quick moment, they may end up overexposing your shot. Feel free to readjust your shutter speed when this happens.

For the ISO, you can start with 800 and go higher in case your portraits take more than ten seconds to expose. Just try not to go higher than 3200 as your chances of getting image noise also increases.

Step 6: Turn the Lights on at the Right Moment

If you’re using continuous light such as LEDs and lamps, keep them turned on for a few moments after you press the shutter. That way, you give the light enough time to expose your subject. After a few seconds turn them off to avoid overexposure.

Remember that the amount of time it takes to expose your subject properly varies. So take some test shots to see if you are under or overexposing your photo. Adjust your shutter speed accordingly until you get the lighting right.

For Flash

In normal situations, flash freezes motion even when you’re using slow shutter speed. But if you combine it with ambient light, you’ll get interesting results. You will have both blurry and sharp elements in your shot.

To use flash for long exposure portraits, you can use a lamp as your key light and place the flash on the other side of your subject. Once you’re ready to shoot, ask your subject to move and press the shutter

The areas lit by the lamp will register as motion blur in your image. Meanwhile, the areas where the flash hits your subject will be frozen and more or less sharper.

Photo by Renzy Atibagos from Pexels

Step 7: Creating Movement

Now that we have the light and camera setup out of the way, it’s time to have fun experimenting. The secret to great long exposure portraits is movement, and there are plenty of ways to do it.

Paint with Light

A technique you can try is light painting or writing using a portable light source. All you have to do is turn on your light and move it around in the air. You can draw patterns, words, or random squiggles. All the movement you make will register as light streaks in your image.

Move the Camera

If you want more control, you can just move the camera. Since it’s on a tripod, the streaks you’ll get would be much cleaner than if your subject were moving. You can tilt it up, down, or sideways. And if you love to play around, you can even ask your model to move around while you reposition your camera.

Ask the Subject to Move

The simplest way to capture motion is to ask your subject to move around. It could be as simple as turning the head once the shutter opens. Or you could ask them to dance to see what effect you get.

Photo by Alexander Krivitskiy from Pexels

Conclusion

Now that you know the techniques required for long exposure keep in mind that it’s still challenging to do. Be patient because you’re bound to make mistakes. Take tons of test shots and figure out what you need to tweak to achieve the best shot.

Don’t be afraid to change the position of your lights and move around to see what works. Most of all, feel free to experiment and surprise yourself with magical results.

Tutorial: How to Capture a Long Exposure Portrait

Tutorial: How to Capture a Long Exposure Portrait - 500px

I met Julia in the year 2000, and that’s when our photo journey began. I constantly thought about how cool it would be, to not be tied to a workplace and to be able to perform all sorts of tasks at will. By accident I found out about iStockphoto and began to study this area. That’s when I bought a camera and together with my wife Julia, we started taking pictures step by step, learning this great medium.

Portraits and Food is what we photograph and it’s a weird combination. But hey… we’re here to do what we love right? I love to create simple portraits of people in studio, I prefer not to call it “fashion”. Once we tried to photograph food only and shortly realized that it was a wrong course to take. You shouldn’t compromise and instead just photograph what you love. The story of “The Sea” photograph is one of the confessions of our love for portraiture photography. Hope you will enjoy the tutorial.

Portrait – Long Exposure. by Alexey & Julia on 500px

Step-By-Step

Without a doubt, one of our images always tends to attract more attention than the rest. The creation of this photograph was executed like none of our others to date. We love to create portraits yet we seldom ever think about the specifics of the shoot beforehand. This is largely because we never know what the mood and/or nature of the model might be. Therefore usually we leave that part to the moment when we meet with the model. Yet this image, I saw it in my head a long time before we created it. We call this one, “The Sea“.

We decided to create a step by step ‘tutorial’ of how we did it and attempt to convey the lighting and the overall technique behind getting the shot. We have prepared preview images of each step of the way, in order to explain how to work with the light in the studio — so that you may visualize and comprehend the process much better than simply through text alone. This is the studio setup that we’ve used, you can recreate it in a studio or at home.

Create your own studio setup in Photoshop.

STEP 1: First Light. The Key Light

For the key light, we used a beauty dish from the left side of the model, positioning it very close to her and placing a a soft diffusing tissue onto the beauty dish. It’s always the same process— first you need to see and test the placement of your main light and what it looks like. So take a test shot or shots, as many as you need until you are happy with the light.

STEP 2: Second Light. Background

As you can see from the image above, we used a gray charcoal background. I will be honest, I love that color so much that most of the portraits I shoot, I do with this colour background. In fact, it’s my addiction (well one of them 🙂 ).

To add a bit of blue to the background you can use colour filters that you attach to your lights with a clip. We have directed a second light with a blue filter, set at 120° degrees and bouncing off the wide-angle reflector and onto the background — creating a sort of the ‘night sky’ effect behind the model. In the image below you will notice that the dark part is at the bottom rather than at the top, so before the final shot we moved it above in order to achieve the desired effect.

STEP 3: Third Light. Contour Light

To the right of the model and roughly one step behind, we have place our third but not final light — a long stripbox with a blue filter. Before the setup, I would recommend to turn off all other light sources for better comprehension of the light environment and for more accurate control of this specific light. Then when you’re ready, simply turn all the lights back on and shoot. These are the results:

STEP 4: Balance Shadows (White Reflector)

As you can see in the image below, the abundance of hair drops a significant shadow onto the eyes of our model. We could have changed the position of the key light but that would alter everything that we have set up so far; therefore in this case, we cannot move it. Instead we chose to work with a white reflector.

A white reflector will usually help you in situations when you need to “rescue” an area from being too dark, so we will need to find a good place to position the reflector. Keep in mind that you don’t want your model moving and helping out (hence changing the position and setup you’ve worked so hard on!) so it’s always better to ask someone else to help out. Also make sure that it is someone who will understand how to execute exactly what’s needed.

STEP 5: Fourth Light & Long Exposure

Now we need to setup one more light (our final light) – the one that you will “draw” with during the long exposure time. For this task we used a stripbox light but, you can accomplish the same effect with any other continuous light you have available (even try your phone). Our source was the modeling light from the stripbox, the one with the blue filter. Remember that one? However, the final result was achieved mixing the use of the main light and a very low power of the blue stripbox light.

Now when you’re happy with your light setup, let the fun begin!!! Setup a long exposure on your camera, start with something like 1 second, be sure that your studio is 100% dark and there is no other lighting — only the light that you’re using on the model and start shooting and shaking your camera in all possible creative ways that you can imagine during the exposure time. From the left to the right, from up to down, shake it, wave it and then shake it some more!

Here are some other RAW examples from our experiments:

Final Image

The final image that you pick depends on what you’re looking for and what you need at the moment. We were shooting for commercial purposes on this day, so we were looking for very good quality and focus. However, I really like many other versions from that day! I hope you enjoyed that little story behind one of our images and that it will push you to go and shoot something new and cool! Experimentation is all that you need. Good luck! Here is the final result with colour correction and retouching:

Portrait – Long Exposure. by Alexey & Julia on 500px

Thanks for reading! Hope you enjoyed this awesome tutorial, for more tutorials browse the blog and check out highly recommended How to paint a ball of light, Long exposure photography and Magic of Oil & Ink tutorials.

If you’d like to see more photographs by Alexey & Julia take a look at their 500px profile, where you can add them to friends, follow future uploads, and even buy one of their photos. To get in touch with Alexey & Julia just leave a comment below. Don’t be shy and say hello 🙂

Long exposure photography

Many photographers, including professionals, use different shutter speeds to create all sorts of artistic effects in their pictures. Everyone, even novice photographers, of course, knows that a fast shutter speed is needed so that the object in the frame does not turn out to be blurry (for example, a person depicted in a portrait shot at a slow shutter speed can get not two, but four eyes - or your hand will tremble, or the person being portrayed will move). And if you shoot a moving object at a slow shutter speed, then a characteristic trail will stretch behind this object in the resulting image.

But, in that case, why do you need a slow shutter speed at all? Does it have its own advantages? Well, of course there is! And these advantages are no less than those of a short shutter speed.

Let's talk about these advantages and talk in more detail.

1. Long exposure in landscape

Long exposure photography of landscapes has become quite popular in recent years. Nature, photographed in this way, looks completely different in the picture than in reality, it appears in a completely different, unusual and unusual form. With the help of long exposures in the photo, it is easy to see the dynamics of the movement of water, stars in the black night sky and clouds in the blue sky during the daytime. A slow shutter speed will show us the trajectory of the raindrops and - you won't believe it - even the sun's rays! And what stunning landscapes are obtained if you shoot them at a slow shutter speed at night!

2. Long exposure portrait photography

Believe it or not, slow shutter speeds can also be used when shooting portraits. When is it possible and even necessary? First of all, long exposure portraits can be shot in low light conditions. In this case, the light flux to the matrix increases significantly and the picture becomes noticeably brighter. But this is far from the only case of using slow shutter speeds in portrait photography. With this shutter speed, you can shoot a portrait with a partially dynamic plot. For example, a beautiful girl against the background of a train moving in the subway. The train will be beautifully oiled, and the model herself will look great against the background of a blurry train, which the train will turn into.

And it is also good to use a slow shutter speed when shooting with the effect of multiple exposure.

3. Transmitting motion with a slow shutter speed

Most often, of course, long exposures are used to convey the movement of various objects. The dynamics of the movement depends on the duration of the shutter speed used. For example, a shutter speed of 3 seconds will make the movement of an object transparent, gentle, airy, and a shutter speed of 30 seconds will change this object outwardly beyond recognition.

4. Creating different effects with slow shutter speeds

Long exposure photography, for example, freezelights. After all, what is the main thing for freezelighting? Of course, complete, well, or at least relatively complete darkness. During those 20-30 seconds during which the camera shutter is open, an experienced freezelighting master can easily draw any interesting picture with light and, having finished his work, will have time to calmly leave the frame. What will he get in the end? As a result, he will receive a beautiful light pattern impressively frozen in the dark. And in freezelighting, you can use various objects and objects, for example, balloons, vases, bottles, books, trees. Even the human figure can be used. It all depends on your idea.

Also, slow shutter speeds are used in photography in a technique called "light brush".

So what is a slow shutter speed?

Not a single book, not a single reference book says exactly and definitely what a long exposure is. For some, a slow shutter speed will be 1/15 or 1/10 of a second. For someone - 1/30 ... Each photographer gives such a definition for himself, based on his own experience, camera features and much more. But, nevertheless, we can definitely say that a beautiful spill of water in your photo will turn out when shooting with a shutter speed of 1/6 second, and with a shutter speed of 45 seconds, exactly the same water will seem like a sandy breeze to the viewer looking at your picture.

How to shoot at a slow shutter speed?

The first thing to say is that at slow shutter speeds you need to shoot exclusively from a tripod, and use a cable to release the shutter. This is necessary in order to prevent camera shake (after all, it is camera shake that leads to image blur!).

Secondly, in order to make the expressive effect of motion more beautiful in a photograph, some scenes need to be shot at a very slow shutter speed and at a low ISO value (for example, 100 or 200 ISO). In extreme cases, if the subject is not drawn well enough in the frame, the sensitivity can be slightly increased - up to 400 ISO units.

Well, and the third. To make the effect even stronger and more noticeable, you can use filters when shooting at slow shutter speeds. For example, neutral.

Long exposure portrait | Blog about photography

This article is a translation of an article posted on the 500px website. In it, Alexey and Yulia Ivanov from the photo duet Ingredients will tell us about the process of creating one of their works. We hope you find this article useful and interesting.

Without a doubt, one of our photographs attracts more attention than the others. The process of creating this photograph was completely different compared to the works created to date. We enjoy creating portraits, although we rarely think about the specifics of shooting before the actual process. Most of the time we do this because we can't predict the mood and nature of the pattern we'll be working with. Usually we leave this part of the work until the very moment of shooting. However, I saw this photo in my imagination long before it was taken. We named it "The Sea".

We decided to create a step by step guide on the process of creating this photo and try to explain the light and the general technique behind this image. We have prepared images of each step to explain in detail how to work with lighting in the studio. So you will be able to visualize and better understand the whole process much better than reading bare text. This is the arrangement of equipment we used in our studio. You can also repeat it at home or in the studio.

Step 1: First light. Main light.

For the key light we used a portrait reflector mounted on the left side of the model, it was placed very close to her. We installed a soft light-diffusing fabric on the portrait reflector. The process is always the same - first you need to test the placement of your main light and see what it looks like. So take a picture or a few until you're happy with the light.

Step 2: Second light. The background.

As you can see in the previous image, we used a charcoal gray background. To be honest, I love this color so much that I did most of my portraits using this color background. To give a bit of blue to the background, you can apply color filters attached to the lights. We set up a second light source with a blue filter at a 120 degree angle to the wide angle reflector so that the light bounces off the reflector and hits the background. All this is done in order to get the effect of the "night sky" behind the model. In the image below, you can see that the darker part of the background is at the bottom instead of at the top as it should be. Therefore, we had to move the second light source higher to get the desired effect.

Step 3: Third light. Back light.

To the right of the model and about a step back from her, we placed the third, but not the last, light source - a large stripbox with a blue filter. Before installation, I would advise turning off the rest of the lights in order to better understand the lighting environment and fine-tune this light source. When you're ready, turn on all the lights and take a couple of photos. Here is the end result.

Step 4: Shadow balance (white reflector).

As you can see in the photo below, the abundance of hair casts a significant shadow over our model's eyes. We could change the location of the main light source, but this would affect all the settings made earlier. So in our case, we can't move it. Instead, we chose to work with a white reflector. It is usually needed in situations where you need to make the selected area less dark. Therefore, we need to choose a good place to install the reflector. Remember that the model should not move and help you set the light (hence changing the position and settings you worked so hard on!). Therefore, the best option would be to ask someone else to help you. Also make sure the person helping you knows how to do what needs to be done.

Step 5: Fourth light and long exposure.

Now we need to set up our last light - the one you will "paint" with when shooting with a long exposure. For this purpose, we used light from a stripbox, but you can try to get the same result with any suitable light source. Our source was the modeling light from the stripbox, the one with the blue filter. Remember? However, the final result was achieved by mixing the light from the main source and a very small amount of light from the blue stripbox.

Now that you're satisfied with all the light settings, let's get to the fun part! Set a slow shutter speed on your camera. Start with a value of about 1 second. Make sure your studio is 100% dark and there is no other light than the light used on the model. Start filming and move your camera during exposure in all possible directions. From left to right, from bottom to top, move it again and again.

Final image.

The final photo depends on what you need and what result you expect to get at the moment. We were filming that day for promotional purposes, so we needed good quality and focus. Although, I liked many of the works received that day. I hope you enjoyed our little story about one of our photos and it will encourage you to shoot and do something new and cool. All you need is to experiment. Good luck! Here is the final result after and retouching.