Long exposure photography uses extended shutter speeds to blur moving elements while keeping stationary elements sharp. Learn its history from Daguerre to contemporary practice.
The first photograph of a person was a long exposure. In 1838 or 1839, Louis Daguerre pointed his camera at the Boulevard du Temple in Paris. The exposure lasted several minutes, long enough that all the moving traffic and pedestrians on the street were rendered invisible. They moved through the frame too quickly to register on the plate. One man remained: a customer having his boots shined at a street corner. He stayed still long enough for the daguerreotype to capture him. That anonymous boot-black customer is the first human being ever photographed, and he exists in the image only because of the long exposure time. The technique that accidentally erased everyone else on the street is the same technique that contemporary photographers use deliberately to smooth water into glass, turn car headlights into ribbons of light, and make stars trail across the night sky.
Long exposure, also called slow-shutter or time-exposure photography, involves using a long-duration shutter speed to sharply capture the stationary elements of a scene while blurring, smearing, or erasing the moving elements. There is no fixed threshold for what counts as "long." A shutter speed of 1/15 second can produce motion blur in a moving subject, while exposures of several minutes are used for extreme effects like smoothing water or removing people from crowded scenes. The defining characteristic is intent: the photographer uses the extended shutter time to show the effect of passing time in a way that a normal exposure cannot.
This entry covers how long exposure works, its history from Daguerre to the present, the photographers who defined it, and how to practice it.
A camera's shutter controls how long the sensor or film is exposed to light. A short shutter speed, like 1/1000 second, freezes motion. A long shutter speed, like 30 seconds, allows motion to accumulate. Anything that moves during the exposure is recorded as a blur. Anything that stays still is recorded sharply. The longer the exposure, the more pronounced the effect.
Long exposures are easiest to achieve in low light, where the lack of ambient light naturally forces longer shutter times. In bright daylight, achieving a long exposure requires reducing the amount of light reaching the sensor. This is done with a neutral density (ND) filter, a darkened piece of glass that screws onto the front of the lens and blocks light without affecting color. A 10-stop ND filter reduces light by a factor of 1,000, turning a 1/100 second exposure into a 10-second exposure. With a strong enough ND filter, exposures of several minutes are possible in full sunlight.
The effects of long exposure fall into several categories. Water becomes smooth or milky, because the ripples and waves average out over the exposure time. Clouds form streaks across the sky. Vehicle lights draw continuous lines called light trails. Stars trace arcs across the image as the Earth rotates. People in crowded places disappear, because each person occupies any given spot for only a fraction of the exposure time. The result is an image that shows not a moment but a duration, a compression of time into a single frame.
Long exposure is as old as photography itself. The earliest photographic processes were extremely slow. Niepce's heliography required hours of exposure. Daguerre's first daguerreotypes required several minutes. These long exposures were not a creative choice. They were a technical limitation. But they produced effects that photographers later learned to exploit deliberately.
The first deliberate use of long exposure for scientific purposes came in the 1880s. Etienne-Jules Marey, a French physiologist, used long exposures at his Station Physiologique in Paris to study human and animal movement. His assistant Georges Demeny dressed subjects in black suits with white lines and points along their limbs, placed them against a black background, and made long exposures on a single photographic plate. The result was a set of overlapping trajectories that traced the paths of the body's joints through space. In 1889, Demeny attached incandescent electric bulbs to the joints of a dark-suited assistant and created Pathological Walk From in Front, an image in which the movement of the human body was traced as a constellation of luminous arcs against a black field. This has a strong claim to being the first deliberate light-trail photograph.
In the 20th century, long exposure became a tool of fine art photography. Brassai used long exposures for his photographs of Paris at night, beginning in the early 1930s. The extended shutter times required by the low light produced blurred traces of traffic and pedestrians that became part of the atmosphere of his images. His photographs of wet streets and passing lamps, collected in Paris de Nuit (1933), used long exposure to create a sense of temporal compression that defined the visual language of night photography.
Contemporary long exposure photography has been transformed by digital technology. Modern cameras can shoot at high ISO settings with acceptable noise, making long exposures possible in conditions that would have defeated film. Live histogram displays in electronic viewfinders allow photographers to watch the exposure build in real time. The introduction of programmable intervalometers and bulb-mode timers has made exposures of hours, rather than minutes, practical. A photographer using a modern mirrorless camera with a 10-stop ND filter can make a 15-minute exposure of a crowded tourist site and produce an image in which every person has vanished.
Daguerre's Boulevard du Temple (1838 or 1839) is the first long exposure photograph. The several-minute exposure erased all moving traffic and pedestrians, leaving only a single man having his boots shined. The image demonstrates the fundamental property of long exposure: stationary elements remain, moving elements disappear.
Marey used long exposure for the scientific study of movement. His geometric chronophotography, developed at the Station Physiologique in Paris from 1882, used long exposures on single plates to trace the trajectories of moving bodies. His work was diagnostic, intended for medical and biomechanical analysis, but the resulting images anticipated the aesthetic use of long exposure by decades.
Brassai's night photographs of Paris, collected in Paris de Nuit (1933), used long exposures to capture the city's streets, parks, and buildings under gaslight and early electric lighting. The extended shutter times produced blurred traces of traffic and passing figures that became part of the visual texture of his images. Brassai was not trying to record motion. He was trying to photograph in very low light. But the long exposures required by those conditions produced effects that became his signature.
Kenna is a contemporary photographer known for long exposure black-and-white photographs of landscapes and architecture. His exposures, often lasting several minutes to several hours, smooth water into mirror-like surfaces, turn clouds into streaks, and erase people from crowded locations. His images of Japanese gardens, English landscapes, and industrial sites demonstrate the aesthetic potential of long exposure as a deliberate artistic technique.
Titarenko's City of Shadows series, photographed in St. Petersburg in the 1990s, uses long exposures to turn crowds of people into blurred, ghost-like forms flowing through the city's streets and squares. The images capture the post-Soviet atmosphere of the city by showing the movement of its inhabitants as a continuous stream rather than as individual figures. The effect is achieved with exposures of several minutes, during which the crowds move through the frame and register only as smears of tone.
You need a camera with manual exposure control, a tripod, and patience. Set the camera on a stable tripod. Choose a low ISO setting to minimize noise. Select a small aperture (high f-number) to reduce the amount of light reaching the sensor. If the shutter speed is still too fast for the effect you want, add a neutral density filter. Compose and focus before attaching the ND filter, because a strong ND filter will make the viewfinder too dark to see through. Switch to manual focus, attach the filter, and take the shot.
For water smoothing, exposures of 1 to 30 seconds are typical. For light trails at night, 10 to 30 seconds. For star trails, exposures of 15 minutes to several hours. For removing people from crowded scenes, 2 to 5 minutes with a 10-stop ND filter in daylight. Experiment with different shutter speeds to find the effect you want. The longer the exposure, the more extreme the motion blur.
Long exposure is a technique used in both film photography and digital photography. It is related to Zone System exposure control, which teaches photographers to previsualize tonal values. The earliest long exposures were made with the daguerreotype process. Long exposure is also used in alternative processes like cyanotype, where exposure times are measured in minutes under UV light. For more on the history of photography, read our post on Ansel Adams and the Zone System, or explore our guide to photography as fine art.
Brassai's night photographs are in the collection of the Musee National d'Art Moderne at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Michael Kenna's long exposure landscapes are held by galleries worldwide, including the Robert Mann Gallery in New York. Alexey Titarenko's City of Shadows series has been exhibited at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and is held in several major collections.
When you look at a long exposure photograph, notice what is sharp and what is blurred. The sharp elements were stationary during the exposure. The blurred elements moved. The image is not a moment frozen in time. It is a duration compressed into a single frame. For more on the broader context of photography, read our entries on the Zone System and silver gelatin printing, or explore our post on Cartier-Bresson and the decisive moment.
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