Shooting long exposures is a great way to take advantage of your surrounding in Landscape Photography. Utilising clouds and water in Long Exposure Photography can really make your image come to life.

Long exposure is basically slowing time in your photography. You extend the amount of time your camera captures the image giving essentially a blurred effect on moving objects.

This technique if fantastic for smoothing out water giving the flat almost ice like effect you see in many photographs. Setting your shutter speed to 30 seconds or more will capture all the movement of the sea and add it to the image. If you had a fast shutter speed you would capture the sea as if you froze time and you would see all the detail captured that second. With long exposure you do the opposite. It’s like you are dragging the sea across your print for the period of time you have selected.

This also works well with clouds, giving the effect that the cloud was smudged across the image. Using these techniques creatively can really add an artistic element to your images.

Photographers use Neutral Density filters to allow them to extend the shutter speed for even longer to give an even smoother effect. A popular filter in Landscape Photography is a 10stop filter. This blocks out 10stops of light from your lens allowing much longer shutter times. If you had the exposure of 1/15 without a filter this would give you a 1 minute exposure with a 10stop filter.

In this video I use my Gobe 10stop filter to capture long exposures at Blyth Beach Northumberland. I’ve included several long exposure tips in this video to help you get the perfect long exposure shot.