Long Exposure

Photographs made with the shutter open for seconds, hours or even years, so movement blurs or vanishes and faint light builds up.

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About

A long exposure keeps the camera's shutter open for seconds, minutes or far longer, so still things record sharply while moving ones blur or disappear. It also gathers faint light, making night scenes bright.

At first photographers had no choice. Joseph Nicéphore Niépce's view from his window at Le Gras (about 1826) needed hours of exposure, and Louis Daguerre's 1838 image of a Paris boulevard looks deserted apart from a man who stood still to have his boots polished. Later artists chose duration deliberately. Gjon Mili photographed Pablo Picasso drawing in the air with a small light in 1949. Hiroshi Sugimoto has exposed film for the full length of a feature in cinemas, leaving the screen a glowing white rectangle. Alexey Titarenko turned crowds in St Petersburg into rivers of shadow in the early 1990s, and Michael Wesely has left cameras open for years to record buildings rising.