Like, for instance, I’ve seen photos of the night sky with crazy details of the stars and they say that this picture was taken with “12 hours exposure”. What does that mean exactly and what does it do?
In: Technology
When there is low light, the camera needs to sit there collecting light for a longer period of time in order to produce a usable photo. Most consumer/smartphone cameras handle this automatically. In a dark environment, your phone camera will actually take slightly longer to take a photo. However you might not notice this because camera manufacturers know that people aren’t going to be willing (or able) to hold still for several minutes while their phone takes a single photo. So they cap the exposure time at some fairly short duration with the tradeoff of not being able to capture photos of very dark environments. It might take a photo in 1/500th of a second in a bright environment, and 1/40th of a second in a dark environment.
But if you are willing to wait for a longer time and are able to keep the camera still, you can bump up the exposure time to multiple seconds, minutes, or even hours. Then you can take pictures in very dark environments and see things that you can’t even see with your eyes.
Latest Answers