photography's longest long-exposure ever taken

birdfromboat wrote in post #15274542
...
I was told long ago about a japanese movie maker that needed images of familiar places with no people present or traffic, so the images were collected by using pinhole cameras...

A Neutral Density filter also can do the same trick:

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
That's really quite a useful trick!
Thanks for that.....[wonder why I didn't think of it before!]

AND, the OP photo is cool, too!
Sadly interesting, is how the photographer's father died halfway through the exposure...
Makes the final image all the more personal.

Regards for now,
Simon

^You welcome

I still have x3.0 ND sitting at home and haven't try myself yet.

natalieerachel wrote in post #15273653
@iowajim It's a DIY pinhole camera, it's inevitable haha

I was trying to be humorous with that comment. The effort is actually quite intriguing to me.

x_tan wrote in post #15274577
A Neutral Density filter also can do the same trick.

except that you are shooting through a larger aperture and not getting the infinite depth of field that a pinhole offers. In fact, using a ND filter is really just allowing you to get a narrower depth of field (assuming you are looking for an equivalent exposure) by using a larger aperture and blurring the foreground and the background.

A pinhole allows so small an amount of light through that only static objects will reflect enough light to get recorded, and every static object that does reflect enough light will be in sharp focus, across the entire image edge to edge if the hole is PERFECTLY round. Thats the way I remember it, it's been a LONG time and like I said before, I had very limited results.

So, could you make a pinhole camera by drilling a body cap?

That's really cool! He must have really thought about the location too, as the Sun perfectly arcs over the bridge!

birdfromboat wrote in post #15276835
So, could you make a pinhole camera by drilling a body cap?

Yes, you could and people do. A few years ago I sold an absolutely MINT 30D. I mean this thing was pristine, only 2,000 or so clicks, etc (it was the backup to my backup camera when I was shooting news).

The girl who bought it didn't want any lenses with it, but asked for a second body cap, when I asked why, she said she wanted to use the camera strictly for pinhole photography.

It completely baffled me as to why she wanted a minty-mint higher end camera (this was years ago, and she gave me top dollar for that camera) to do it, but yeah, apparently there are people out there doing it.

EDIT: You may be interested in some of these groups, which include digital pinhole:

http://www.flickr.com/​search/groups/?q=pinho​le

birdfromboat wrote in post #15274542
I was told long ago about a japanese movie maker that needed images of familiar places with no people present or traffic, so the images were collected by using pinhole cameras.

Yep, that works, as does an ND filter. In fact, when I was in Europe this summer, I kept taking long exposure shots of busy places at night, specifically to "erase" people.

wow