I’m getting ready to take a photography class at my school. The class isn’t necessary for my degree (I’ve already fulfilled the art portion), but like I said last night, I want to get better. The class starts on the 28th and runs 2 nights a week for the next 16 weeks. I have a feeling I’m going to have fun…

Speaking of fun, I decided to experiment a little more with my camera today. Today I messed with the BULB exposure setting. The BULB setting lets me keep the shutter open as long as I want (or until the battery dies, whichever comes first). When coupled with a high f-stop and low ISO, you can do some pretty neat things with this function. Living in Houston I don’t get many stars at night so star streaks were out of the question. What I decided to do was photograph my sitting room with the bulb setting. The Aperture on all 3 of the following photos was set at f/2.8, the ISO on all three was 100, and there was zero exposure compensation. The only thing different were the shutter speeds.


This picture of my sitting room was taken with the light on to provide a point of reference. Although in the other shots the camera has moved a little bit, these shots were all taken between 12:30 am and 1:30 am. The shutter speed on this pic is 1/6 sec.


This is the sitting room after 10 seconds of open shutter. All you can see at this point is the light through the curtain.


Here is the picture after 720 seconds… that’s 12 minutes of open shutter. All this is from ambient light in the room. As this room is fairly isolated from the living room and kitchen lights, that means the ambient light is coming from almost opaque curtains. Notice the detail that is captured here but not in the first shot where the light is on. In fact, one could say this was done during the day, but in fact it was shot at 1:30 am on 28 August.

These were by no means the only shots taken. There are more shots of different subjects taken during my experiments with BULB exposure. I chose these as an example. The only digital processing done on these photos was to convert the file formats and shrink the image to a decent file size. I learned more about the relationship of aperture and shutter speed by doing this today.

Well, at this point I’m going to call it a night as it is rather late. Before I go, however, I leave you with a pic that I took over the weekend.


A swampy area in Brazos Bend State Park, Needville, TX. For this I needed to dial back the exposure (quite a bit, which is surprising when you see the stats), dial up the saturation, and fix the highlights (some were badly blown) and shadows (not so much, but a little detail was lost in the exposure). The only other post processing done was to crop the image and convert from CanonRAW to .jpg.
Aperture: f/22
Shutter Speed: 1/15 sec
ISO400 with zero exposure compensation
Focal Length: 19mm