Problem with Long Exposure

KevinPutman · Apr 13, 2011

I recently took my camera (Canon Powershot S5 IS) to the zoo, and thought I'd take a nice long exposure picture of a waterfall. But when I switched it to the setting, it would go completely white on the screen, and in all the pictures.
I played with all the settings, and messed around for probably 20 minutes trying to figure out what was wrong, to no avail. Although when I was inside, in a darker setting, it worked fine. Any idea why it was doing this?

Lyncca · Apr 13, 2011

You were over exposing the image. Outside when it is sunny, you need a really small aperture (higher number), and even then sometimes it isn't enough and you would need a neutral density filter that will drop the stops down for you and allow for you to get the right exposure.

KevinPutman · Apr 14, 2011

Another thing,
when the on-board flash was raised, the brightness would occur, but when it was lowered, it wouldn't. (In certain situations).
Does the flash being up determine certain settings on the camera?

Edsport · Apr 14, 2011

The flash just over exposed it more. You need to have a faster shutter speed in bright light or as mentioned before, a smaller aperture or you could lower the ISO if it's possible with that camera, i'm not familiar with that camera so i have no idea if you can or not...

Lyncca · Apr 14, 2011

Are you working in full manual on your camera? When you said you put it on the setting, I'm assuming it was a preset? Those are just guestimates for exposure. You still have to be in the right environment for them to work properly. If you can shoot in at least shutter priority, try putting to at least at 1/8th of a second (you may not be able to go much longer than that in bright sunlight) but that should get you a little bit of the silky water effect, and then let the camera figure out the aperture for you. That's a baby step into working in full manual

Also, make sure your ISO is as low as it will go like ISO 100 or 200 in bright sunlight.

KevinPutman · Apr 14, 2011

I was switching between full manual and Shutter speed priority, trying to see if I could get the brightness to go away.
I'll have to test it on 1/8 and see if it makes a difference. Thanks for the tips =]

Although it still bugged me as to how having the flash up would change the exposure,
just putting it up shouldn't affect the exposure of what I see through the viewfinder, should it?
Is there some explanation to that?

Lyncca · Apr 14, 2011

I don't think a pop-up flash would be strong enough to change the exposure of a waterfall, and I'm not really experienced with the popup (I think they are evil), but if you happened to be at a higher shutter speed than 1/250 (which is probably the case on a sunny day), then the camera may have automatically switched it down to 1/250 because the flash can only sync at that speed (at least this is the case with my camera with a strobe, I think the pop-up works the same way, but I'm not 100% on that), which would then over-expose the image even that much more. Checking your EXIF data on your images from flash to non-flash should be a pretty quick indicator if this is what happened.

Even on manual, my camera will not go higher than 1/250, so then I have to close the aperture to get good exposure with my flash attached.

Make sense?

By the way, even if it was strong enough, you wouldn't want a flash in this scenario anyway, because flash freezes motion, and you want to show motion to get the silky effect.