AppArt School – Long Exposure Photography
I take a lot of photos. I love to go for short trips to scenic places and take landscape and nature shots. Initially, my main shooter was mirrorless Sony A6000 — small and compact, easy to carry around.
However, lately, most of my Landscape and Nature photos are taken with my Mobile phone — HONOR 10 / HONOR Play / HONOR 9X.
Most HONOR flagship phones let you to shoot in DNG RAW in Pro mode. As a Landscape Photographer, it’s a great convenience to have the default camera app supporting Pro mode and DNG raw shooting. You don’t have to install a third party app to shoot dng raw on HONOR flagship phones.
30s Exposure shot in Pro Mode — DNG RAW Edited in Lightroom Mobile
There are some Special Camera modes on HONOR phones that let’s you take some great Landscape photos which are often impossible to take on any other phone or using a high end DSLR or Mirrorless camera.
Impossible to take on a DSLR ? are you kidding ? NO. I’m not.
If you are a landscape photographer, you sure would have tried Long Exposure Photography. Everyone love to create some unique looking long exposure shots. The issue we often face when we shoot long exposure photos with a DSLR or Mirrorless is, in order to shoot during day time, to get the right exposure, we have to use a lot of ND filters to cut down the light. It’s quite difficult and time consuming to get the exact shot you want.
With Huawei HONOR phones, it’s so easy to create long exposure shots — even during day time — even when the sun is out there.
In the default camera app, there is a mode called Light Painting. Under that, there is a shooting mode called Silky Water. This has become my favourite tool to create some unique, great looking, long exposure shots.
You don’t need ND Filters to shoot long exposure photos using Silky Water mode. You can even do minutes long exposures ( of course need a Tripod ) during Sunset hours without overexposing. That’s impossible to do on a DSLR or Mirrorless without a stack of ND Filters.
Check out some example shots of Silky Water Long Exposure below.
63 seconds Long Exposure — Shot using Silky Water Mode — Taken with HONOR Play — Edited in Lightroom Mobile
3 mins Long Exposure shot with HONOR Play — Edited in Lightroom Mobile.
19 secs Exposure using Silky Water Mode using HONOR Play- Edited in Lightroom mobile.
Traffic Trails ( again under Light Painting ) is another great night time photography tool to have on your phone. It let’s you shoot Traffic Light Trails as the vehicles pass by. You can see the Live Image being created on the display, so you can hit stop when you have got the desired shot.
Here is a Traffic Light Trails Example
107 seconds Exposure — Light Trails Mode — Edited in Polarr.
59 seconds Exposure — Light Trails Mode on HONOR 10. Edited in Lightroom mobile.
Ever wanted to Shoot a Lightning Storm in the Sky with your Android Smartphone ? The same Traffic Trails mode can be used to capture Lightning ( Be Safe ). Point the camera to the sky when lightning is going on and let it shoot for some minutes. I haven’t got any sample shots to show off as i live in a place where we don’t get such lightning action often.
Another interesting mode i love on my HONOR 10 is the Night Mode. It let’s you shoot long exposure shot at night handheld and give you images which you would normally need a tripod to shoot. Example shot below — that’s a 7 seconds exposure — handheld.
7 secs handheld shot on HONOR 10 in Night Mode. Edited in LrMobile.
Keep in my mind, not all HONOR / Huawei phones performs the same in this mode. I think the ones with OIS performs better and the cheap ones like 8X would need a tripod to get shake free images.
All in all, Huawei / HONOR Mobiles are great tools for Landscape Photography and Creative Long Exposure photography. A must buy phone if you are a Landscape photographer.
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