Slow shutter

Today I decided that I wanted to go out and take a photo of blurred pedestrians walking down a street, using a slow shutter.

I’d never tried this before but I thought I knew what to do. I used both of my ND filters (an ND4 and an ND8) to limit the amount of light coming into the camera. I didn’t know which settings to choose on the camera so before I set out I had a fiddle with the settings in the well-lit office. On my trusty camera, a Fuji S9600, using the lowest sensitivity (ISO 80) and the smallest aperture (f/11) I was able to get a shutter speed of 25 seconds without overexposing the shot. I reminded myself that outdoors it would be brighter, and perhaps I would have to use a shutter speed more like 5 seconds.

It turns out in the end I wasn’t able to have a longer shutter than one second. I’m still reasonably pleased with the photo, though. Shame there weren’t many people about.

The moral of the story is: The sun is much, much brighter than you think!