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Aerial long exposure photography

jgnu

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Hi!

I love long exposure photography (on the ground), and I've been trying a bit of long expos with my drone as well. It's obviously hard to pull off really long exposures, but I find that 2-3s exposures are often quite doable with my mavic pro platinum.

Is anyone else doing long exposure photography from their drones? I would love to see your shots and hear any stories or tips you might have! How long exposures have you managed to pull off that are still acceptably sharp?

Here are a few observations I've made:
- Needs to be a calm night with not much wind (of course).
- The best time is during blue hour, when the sky still has some color (not all black), and you still have a liiiitle bit of light on the landscape.
- Both moving water and moving lights (cars!) are great elements to use in the composition.
- Do a burst of shots! Good for getting the timing of moving cars right, and greater chance that at least some of the shots are sharp.
- You can also stack multiple 2-3s exposures in photoshop to get longer light trails, or more movement in water.

Here are two shots of mine. Please share yours!

bridge.jpg

going_fast.jpg
 
Doesn't look like this thread attracted very much interest, but that's ok. :)

I tried something new today; daytime long exposure while moving fast. I used a 6-stop ND to get shutter speeds of about 1/15 s. My plan was to find some fields full of green wheat, with a clear horizon, and then get the foreground wheat to be all motion blurred, but keep the horizon sharp.

As it turns out, the fields near me don't have wheat growing yet, but I found this bright yellow field (rapeseed, i think?) that worked really well. I also learned that objects further away (like the trees in this image) stay sharp as long as you are moving straight towards them.

It was slightly scary to fly this close to the crop, but I really quite like the resulting shot. I will definitely try this again, both with the green wheat I envisioned, but also later in the season when the wheat is nice and golden (maybe at sunset?).

20200604-DJI_0681.jpg
 
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