It’s good fun to make people disappear by using long exposures. All you need is a fairly dark location and a firm camera position. By putting the camera on the steps here at the British Museum and using a range of exposures from six seconds to half a second you can see the visitors disappearing as their movement blurs them into obscurity.
In order to lengthen the exposure, you need to reduce the ISO to the minimum value. This makes the camera less sensitive to light and therefore requires longer shutter speeds. Then it’s a case of using shutter priority – S or Tv and setting shutter speed long enough to blur things away as required.
They do not allow tripods in the British Museum, and obviously these sorts of shutter speeds are impossible to hand hold. So in this picture Phil rested the camera on a sign and used the cameras timer to keep it still. The idea was to capture the timelessness of the Egyptian statue and the ephemeral nature of tourism. Either that or just have some blurry stuff to look cool.
Give it a go, it’s as easy as it looks!