Long exposure photography is a popular genre. Whether you like to capture star trails, astro photographs of the Milky Way, urban night photographs or long exposures of seascapes with ethereal milky water, most modern cameras have tools or modes to support this.
Many cameras have some form of bulb or time exposure setting. However, most do it 19th century style, keeping you finger on the shutter button or holding the shutter open with a wired release. Some cameras display a timer during the exposure and some allow the exposure to be controlled by a smartphone app over wifi, which is useful, but beyond that most offer little in the way of convenience features. To get decent results, photographers have to calculate exposures in advance and test their calculations by trial and error. Given long exposures take a long time (!), this trial and error guesswork process can result in lengthy elapsed times per shot and a lot of frustration for the impatient. Except for Olympus cameras.
Several Olympus m4/3 models have an intriguing Live Time exposure mode that makes capturing your long exposures more convenient and reliable. On my EM10 Mk 1, when in manual exposure mode, there are additional settings on the shutter speed dial after the 60 second longest shutter speed. The one that interests us for the purposes of this article is “Live Time”.
Live Time is a “T” setting – you press the shutter once to open it and it stays open until you press the shutter a second time. Most cameras have T settings. But Olympus have enhanced their mode. In Live Time mode, the camera periodically interrupts the exposure to display the image captured up to that point and a histogram. After displaying the part completed image, the long exposure continues. This means you can watch the exposure slowly build up during the exposure and judge the right moment when to close the shutter for the perfect exposure.
I can’t emphasis enough how this transforms the experience of shooting long exposures. It stops being a process of guesswork and trial and error and becomes something you can control by inspection. Live time allows you to judge your long exposures with perfect accuracy with each and every shot and there is no need to re-shoot incorrect exposures. With Live Time, long exposure photography becomes more controllable and more fun. I got my EM10 exclusively for this feature (the camera has a whole isn’t my cup of tea).
Live time mode interrupts the exposure periodically – you can select how many interruptions there are and how far apart they are in the set up process. There is a maximum number that depends on the ISO setting so you do need to judge it so up don’t run out of previews before the end. After the maximum number of previews is reached, Live Time reverts to old fashioned T setting.
In the next article, Part 2, I’ll walk you through the process. See Part 2: Live Time – How to use it.
Leave a Reply