Long Exposures for street photography

[Alex1994]

Hello

I am aware that a similar topic has been covered in another thread, but I am looking to do something different =)

Here's the event I want to photograph: the UK Big Freeze in my home town, Reading, UK. This is an event where a group of people stand stock-still for 5 minutes in a public place.

My plan is to mount my camera on a tripod and take a long exposure shot of someone taking part, that way the frozen subject will be clear on the picture, but any other member of the public milling around will be blurred.

This has raised a lot of questions about how to get a long exposure shot in daylight conditions without overblowing the exposure completely. I think that to achieve the right amount of blur I need an exposure of 4 seconds (metered, assuming regular daylight exposure value of 13-14 ). I plan to use Kodak Ektar 100 film - does anyone know what reciprocity failure that has? If anyone has a better film to recommend (I'm going for colour because of the exposure latitude) then please go ahead. What else will I need to do?

Thanks

Alex

[Mike Wilde]

Research neutral density filters. I recommend you experiment with stacking theatre type Lee/Rosco gels first before spending on either wratten filters or glass ND.

I have used 6 stop and 9 stop filters to good effect in taking pictures on moving water in creeks and streams. For me a sheet of Rosco gel was about $6 for about 20x30". Three stacked peices of bits from sheets from the 97-99 range of Rosco's numbering should do.

Look at a designer swatch book; about $30 and a huge selection of gel to get your creative mind mulling

[tiberiustibz]

You probably won't have to worry about reciprocity in the 4 second range.

[BetterSense]

Look at a designer swatch book; about $30 and a huge selection of gel to get your creative mind mulling

Where can one get such a swatch book? I've been looking for a way to lay in a large supply of various colored gels that I can just hold over my lenses or stick in a cokin holder.

[Tim Gray]

You can get small swatchbooks from B&H. About 1x2 inches with a billion different gels. Used to be free, but now are about $2. Search for 'swatchbook'. Actually, I see they have a cinema version that is 3x5. Might be exactly what you want.

If you need larger gels than that, you can usually get kits for about $20 that have about 20 different gels in them in larger sizes. A couple each of ND, CTO/CTB, diffusion, and then about 8 party gels.