WOW.. U´ve helped me a lot.. I´ve tryed your setup on my 400 d and it went really great. I got the “at night” shoot and I LUV IT !! Thanx a lot… and great picture by the way…..

flickr.com/photos/dazecoop/110...

I have no idea what’s happened to that other long exposure of mine, perhaps it never happened! Weird!

No, 37 minutes as a solid one exposure. Not patched together! What I’m saying is that I really was standing there for 37 minutes taking one photo. Of course, the ISO was set to 100 (the lowest on the 400d) and the aperture was f4. The 37 min exposure that I did, if I remember correctly, was in quite a dense forest with minimal light pollution therefore it did actually come out as star trails rather than just white.

I think its quite possible to do a 3 or 4 hour exposure with the 400d, but battery life gets killed on long exposures, plus the cold also doesn’t help.

I hope this helps you out! A friend of mine has beaten me on this by the way, with a 45 minute single exposure on his 400d.

You must have meant 37 minutes total of 25 second exposures?

1, I think you’ve got some mislead information from somewhere (maybe me? not sure!), but the photo above was only a 25 second exposure, not 37 minutes! 37 minutes with that sort of light would, probably yes, almost certainly be completely over-exposed and white.

2, At night, when taking a photo of this kind (with anything above about 4 seconds) only bright lights are shown up. This is exaggerated the longer and longer the exposure goes for. Since the body of the car itself is not actually a “light” nor is it “lit-up” then it won’t show up, or at least it won’t show up as much as its lights on the front of the car. Occasionally on long exposures at night with cars you can often see white cars or buses with the lights inside lit-up. This goes for almost anything at night when taking photos, for example if you were taking a photo of yourself moving around while holding a torch, you’d only see the torch and not yourself if you were moving around since the torch is so much brighter than you! (I mean that littrally - no offence!!)

You’ll probably understand better after you’ve had a good play around with your new 400d. Enjoy!

First of all, Les, I would highly recommend RAW file formats for the best in picture quality, sharpness, etc, because there is zero compression, and therefore zero loss in picture quality. Secondly, there are some sharpness, colour, sat settings in the camera’s menu. Off hand I can’t remember exactly where, but I think its on the 2nd menu.

And Graeme, you can go for as long as you want on BULB mode (for as long as the batteries last). For up to 30 seconds, you don’t have to use BULB mode, but for anything more then I would suggest buying a remote shutter (RS 60E3) where you can set the camera up then just press down the remote shutter button and lock it so that you don’t have to stand holding the shutter button for the length of the exposure. The longest I’ve done before is 37 minutes (which is not very much at all), but with the double battery grip (BG E3) which has twice the battery capacity as it is without, I think you could go for about 4 hours straight, or without the grip, about 2 hours before the batteries give up.

whats the max time you can have bulb on on the 400d?
recieving one at christmas and think its the only data im not sure about, would love to know,

thanks Graeme