Belinda Kohek Photography: Learning about bulb mode.....

The photographs below were captured using a functionality of my camera I haven't really explored before. The 'bulb' mode allows the shutter release to be held open for as long as you choose. This is slightly different to the shutter priority mode, which limits the aperture you can use, and as the minimum shutter speed is 30" there is a limit as to how much light can be captured.

With these photos I captured last night, I simply switched to bulb mode and set an aperture of f/16. I then held the shutter down for as long as I desired to capture the maximum amount of light. For these photos the shutter speed was between 89" to 95" (I timed it with my iPhone).

The advantage of this camera function is that you can continue photographing well after sunset. These photographs were taken more than an hour after sunset, which if captured under normal settings, even using the minimum shutter speed of 30", the image would have appeared very dark. Another great use of bulb mode is to capture light trails (on display in my next post). The last trick is that by using a long shutter speed people walking into the range of the photo (in this series there were a few people walking down the pier) are not captured in the final image.

The longer shutter speed highlights the movement of clouds in the sky, particularly in the third set of photographs. I've included the first set of photos using the maximum shutter speed of 30", sixty minutes after sunset with lots of surrounding light. The remaining images were captured at least 90 minutes after sunset.

I couldn't decide between my favourite black and white, or the warm colours of the colour images (it wasn't so warm standing on the pier!).