Simulating long exposures with iPhone

I took two photos of the moving water, the left with Live Image turned off and the right with Live Image turned on.  Then I altered the right image in Edit mode.

One of the problems I have with smartphone cameras is the inability to control aperture and sometimes even shutter speed and ISO.  Android allows you to have some degree of control over shutter speed and ISO in Pro mode, but the inability to alter the aperture has a very similar overall effect.  iPhones, on the other hand, give you almost no control over any of the exposure settings (exposure compensation excluded), but it does have a pretty neat feature that simulates a long exposure.

Left:  the top and bottom of the iPhone camera screen.
Right:  Part of the Edit screen from iPhone

A feature that creates a Live exposure allows you to capture a short 1.5 second video of a scene.  I created a loop; you can see the video below.

iPhone's edit mode allows you to take the live image and convert it into a "long exposure."  In fact, what it does is to take every frame from the video and superimpose them on top of each other with gain enabled so that you get a proper exposure.  The end result depends highly on what and how the image was filmed.

There are a couple of notes worth pointing out.  When live is turned off, you get a much larger file (12 mp), and if you use HEIF format, there are no artifacts.  The song exposure image is smaller (about 10 mp on my computer).  I haven't played with moving lights yet, but I have to assume that there may be a strobe-like effect if the rate of motion is high enough.  If you are having a hard time opening the video file, try going into the Options menu (I found that when I emailed the file) and select the most compatible feature.  That worked fine for me, it is the image you see above.

If you want to actually try a long exposure, you may want to use a neutral density filter over the camera of choice.  the iPhone 15 Pro has a night mode feature allowing me to take long exposure photos without emulating action.  I still have to play with this; I will get back to you later on the result.

Thanks for reading.

Eric Svendsen     www.ericspix.com

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