longexposure

If you live in a remote area with dark skies, you are one of the lucky ones; the lucky ones that get to look up on a clear dark night and see a thick band of glowing light stretch across the sky.

We recently shared a 52-week photo challenge you can do to improve you skills over the course of a year. The challenge for week #1 was "self portrait," and photographer Trevor Mahlmann completed it by creating this eye-popping photo, titled "The Universe At My Feet."

Yesterday, SpaceX successfully launched its Falcon 9 rocket, delivered 11 satellites into orbit, turned it around, and safely landed the first stage booster back to the ground at Cape Canaveral, Florida. It's the first time this has been ever done with an orbit-capable rocket.

"Un Petit Tour Dans Paris" is a new 1.5-minute short film by French director Maxime Baudin.

"In a splendid and romantic Paris, while everything is going too fast, a young man ride a ‘bicyle’," the synopsis reads. "But his simple ride is going to take on a whole new dimension…"

How long can you strike a certain pose and stay perfectly still? For pinhole photographer Israel Caballero's project Veneno Dulce ("Sweet Poison"), models were required to stand and sit motionless in front of his camera for over 10 minutes at a time.

A spirograph is a geometric drawing toy that produces beautiful mathematical curves by rolling a smaller circle inside a bigger circle. You can create similar patterns using light painting.

Did you know that you can easily see geostationary satellites by shooting time-lapse photos of the night sky? Reddit user jannne took his camera outside this week and managed to capture a number of satellites in their photos.

"Impermanent Sculptures" is a series of light-painting photos by Brazilian photographer Vitor Schietti. One of the interesting ideas found in the series is using fireworks to illuminate trees, resulting in photos that look like the leaves and branches are showering drops of light onto the ground.

For the past few wildfire seasons in Southern California, Los Angeles-based photographer Stuart Palley has taken his camera out into the hills to document the blazes at night. His long-exposure photographs show both the fury and the beauty of the fires. The resulting collection of images is now part of a series titled Terra Flamma.

Photographer Trevor Mahlmann has a knack for capturing light trails showing the International Space Station zipping across the sky. Back in June, he made headlines by photographing the ISS from the seat of airliner as he cruised at 40,000 feet. Now he's back again with another neat feat: he shot a self-portrait of himself staring up at the ISS as it zipped by overhead.

Believe it or not, the image above isn't a digital composite created in Photoshop -- it's a light painting photo captured using a film camera. Photographer Jason D. Page spent four years planning for this shot before finally capturing it in just the right conditions recently.

This is impressive: photographer and aspiring astronaut Trevor Mahlmann was sitting in the seat of an airplane at 40,000 feet this past Tuesday when he managed to plan and shoot this stacked long-exposure photo showing the International Space Station whizzing by.

Steel wool is often done by lighting a small ball of steel wool on fire and then swinging it around in a long exposure photo while it burns. But what happens when you take it to the extreme? The folks over at Joby recently decided to see what you get when you burn a giant 2-foot ball of burning steel wool.

Photographer Keow Wee Loong of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, just got his hands on the new Huawei P8 smartphone, which has an innovative "Light Painting" feature that stacks multiple images to create single long-exposure photos.

To test the feature out, Loong shot a series of 6-7 minute exposures while light painting a model. These are the resulting unedited photos that were taken straight out of the smartphone.

Photographer Eric Paré has built much of his career around the concept of light painting, but a recent photo shoot he did involved a very different source of lighting: the bioluminescence of glowing plankton.

This starry double exposure-style photograph was made using a single long exposure. Photographer Ted Schiele was 190 seconds into a long exposure photo of the night sky when he heard a car coming down the road. He then pointed his camera down towards the car and exposed the camera for another 13 seconds as it approached.

You've probably seen star trail photos before, but how about a "moon trail?" A Finnish photographer named Janne shot this beautiful photo earlier this week as the rising moon streaked across the sky. Janne was shooting with a Nikon D800 and 100-300mm lens at 300mm, f/8, and ISO 100. The trick behind the shot was a 10-stop neutral density filter, which greatly cut down the amount of light hitting the sensor and allowed Janne to shoot a 2258-second exposure -- that's a whopping 37.6 minutes!

Want to try your hand at creating a solargraph? Photographer Justin Quinnell recorded this informative and humorous 14-minute video tutorial on how you can create a pinhole camera for 6-month-long exposures using only a beer can, some photo paper, a pin, and lots of gaffer tape (which Quinnell calls the "elixir of life").

Polish photographer Bartosz Wojczyński pointed his camera straight at the north celestial pole and exposed his camera for a total of six hours. The photograph above is what resulted.

Photographer Gary Schneider shoots portraits with a rather unusual technique. For his project titled Faces, Schneider had his subjects lie on a black backdrop under his large format camera and then sit still for eight minutes while Schneider slowly illuminated the details of their faces with a small light.

The Internet is teeming with photographs and videos of the starry night sky that dazzle the eyes and tickle the imagination, but have you ever wondered how the imagery compares to what photographer's naked eye actually saw while the camera was taking a picture?

Photographer inefekt69 recently decided to answer that question by creating the photos above. On the left is what the human eye could see in the dark, outdoor field, and on the right is the photo he shared online.

Photographer Calder Wilson recently did some experimentation by attaching fireworks to a drone and then flying it around in a long exposure photograph. The results are beautiful to look at.

Did you know that some creatures can actually see the world in long exposures? Scientists recently discovered that cockroaches are the latest insect found to have that feature built into their eyes and brains. It allows the resilient little bugs to see in near-pitch black environments.

It is often said that "luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity." This photo may be a good example of that. It's a single long-exposure photo of mountains in South America with the stars properly exposed in the background and the landscape in the foreground illuminated by the rising moon.

Photographer Josh Cripps of Professional Photography Tips made this short and sweet introductory tutorial on how you can use 10-stop neutral density filters to capture long exposure photos in bright daylight. These filters drastically reduce the amount of light hitting your lens, allowing you to blur slow-moving things in your scene (e.g. clouds or streams).

Jonathon Keats wants to set a world record in photography that he won't live long enough to see. Nor will his children, or his children's children for many generations. It's a project that won't complete for a millennium.

Keats plans to capture the world's slowest photograph, a 1,000-year-long exposure of the city of Tempe, Arizona, that will be finished in the Spring of 3015.

For the past two years, British photographer Paul Thompson has been trying to push the boundaries of night photography with his large format film camera. His images of landscapes and seascapes are captured under moonlight and require exposure times of up to two hours. The resulting project is aptly titled "Moonlight."

Ever since light painting exploded onto the scene some years ago, writing your signature by waving a light source in a long exposure has become a very common photo idea. But have you ever tried writing your signature by waving your camera at the moon?

That's what photographer John Kraus attempted recently, and the photo above shows the results of his effort.

Award-winning photographer Takehito Miyatake is known for his beautiful long-exposure photographs of volcanos erupting, beaches adorned with bioluminescent creatures and fireflies that light up the night sky.

And today, we have for you some of his most beautiful work, all shot on his digital 4x5 camera.

It's one thing to visualize different layers of gasses in the Earth's atmosphere and see drawings and models in a book or online... it's another thing entirely to capture it on camera. But of course, that's one of the perks of being an astronaut on the International Space Station, you get to do a whole lot of things that are "another thing entirely."

The photograph above was taken by astronaut Reid Wiseman and uploaded to his Twitter feed early this morning. It's a 3-second exposure, and we know this because he captioned the photo "3 second shutter exposure at night shows how crazy our #atmosphere really is."

So much of the world today is invisible to cameras. Technology operates in a light-less world of zeroes and ones, electromagnetic waves that fly over our heads in ever-increasing abundance.

For his fascinating project Digital Ethereal, designer Luis Hernan set out to capture one of these invisible signals, WiFi, using a creative combination of long exposure photography and an Android app.

Brian Matthew Hart has spent the better part of 9 years playing around with unique light drawing techniques. His latest project, Uncertainty, brings together the knowledge and inspiration he’s accumulated over those 9 years and packs them into one of the most abstracted and unique approaches to light painting we’ve ever come across.

Long exposure photographs are usually measured in seconds or minutes. Use solargraphy, and you might measure in months or years. The longest we've heard of so far are photos spanning decades.

Well, those exposure times are relatively short compared to Jonathon Keats's "century cameras": they're specially designed cameras that will take 100-year-long exposures!

Long exposure photography like UK photographer Darren Moore's is the polar opposite of the super fast, super sensitive in low light kind of photography that gets most of the attention these days. It's time-consuming and difficult, but the unearthly quality of the images that Moore produces make dealing with those challenges well worth it.

Heartbreak and tribulation are never something we strive for. Yet, they're unavoidable byproducts of a life well-lived, that teach us lessons along the way.

In addition to those lessons, these struggles often produce inspiration out of a need for escape or expression. And it was such a need that drove New Orleans native Frank Relle into the welcome embraces of long exposure photography and the city he calls home.

Firefly photography isn't a novel concept. In fact, long-exposure images of these glowing creatures lighting up beautiful forest scenes have appeared on PetaPixel a couple of times before... we've even featured a tutorial on the subject. But photographer Vincent Brady's firefly time-lapse above IS novel.

It's novel, not because it's a time-lapse of fireflies (we're sure that's been done a time or two) but because he combined many different photographic techniques to create something truly breathtaking.

There are a few photos that every photographer takes in their lifetime. It doesn't matter who you are or where you came from, you've taken these photos or will take them one day in the future. They're mostly tired shots we're all probably best avoiding, yet none of us can. Even having read this, someday you'll catch yourself mid click, snapping off one of these photos.

Yes, much like the proverbial photographic flame to our poor, moth-like eyeballs, these photos have an allure we can't deny. No matter how self-aware or disciplined we are, we'll forever be incapable of escaping the seven photos every photographer takes.

We've seen plenty of RC drone footage and we've most certainly seen plenty of light painting photos. But what happens when you combine the two? You end up with this.

Inspired by Close Encounters of the Third Kind, production studio Fiction hooked up lights to a DJI Phantom RC drone and captured long exposure photographs while flying the drone through the frame in specific patterns. The results are interesting to say the least.

Human photographers aren't the only ones dragging their cameras to every corner of the globe in search of the decisive moment. As it turns out, a little LEGO man spent a year doing the same thing as part of life-sized human photographer Andrew Whyte's fun 'The Legographer' series.

Former ballet dancer and professional photographer Jesús Chapa-Malacara has two great passions in life: yep, you guessed right, they're dance and photography. These two passions collide in his recent Dance Prints series, a beautiful motion photography project that, with your help, he hopes to take to the next level.