Long Exposure

I've been experimenting with long exposures recently. I tried some in the country near Scarborough when it was near pitch-black (see above). I managed to get about 1 good shot for every 30 shots I took, and when they're all about 40 second exposures, that's an annoyingly large amount of wasted battery life. Bastard cars kept speeding down the road that I was stood next with full-beam headlights on which was kinda annoying.

Another day, back at home in Leeds, down on Kirkstall Road. I took out a tripod and some fresh batteries. I got some interesting photos, but there seems to be a lot of mess in the photos near the light sources.

 

I stood in the middle of the road for a few shots. These ones seemed to work a lot better, except people kept slowing down in cars to look at what I was doing. Or maybe they thought I was some kinda speed camera guy. I'm not.

I tried some off-flash techniques too on the same night, but because I don't have a sync cable or anything, I set long exposures so I could manually trigger the flash at the subject. In this case, my subject was my sister, who is always eager to pose. 

 

For these photos I used a small Vivitar 16m flash unit. It's less complicated and recharges faster than my FL40.