I’ve been interested in night photography almost as soon as I started taking photos, and with it came a fascination about long exposures. There is the opportunity with a long exposure to capture in a single frame, things that the human eye cannot fully appreciate; especially movement, or timeliness of objects and their placements. The version of this that has become relatively cliched recently is light-writing; using a torch or a light source to “draw” or “paint” with light in the dark. I’ll confess that I’ve had a play with it myself.

There are however some fantastic examples of really long exposures that have been done to great effect. We’re not talking seconds, or even minutes; this is hours, days, weeks and even months:

• Solargraphy.com – a project that invites people to chart the movement of the sun across their landscapes around the world.
• Justin Quinell’s Slow Light – much the same as the above, but deserves a mention, as Justin is one of the first long exposure pinhole photographers that I came across
• Michael Wesely’s Open Shutter – a project that documents either the building or demolishing of architectural structures. The parts that remain in place for longest are more solid in the final image, whereas those bits that we’re added or removed are more ghostly and transient in the images

All of these are rather cool…now I wonder if there’s something different that I could do with long exposures…?