Quotes & Sayings About Long Exposure Photography

Cartier-Bresson has said that photography seizes a 'decisive moment', that's true except that it shouldn't be taken too narrowly ... does my picture of a cobweb in the rain represent a decisive moment? The exposure time was probably three or four minutes. That's a pretty long moment. I would say the decisive moment in that case was the moment in which I saw this thing and decided I wanted to photograph it. — Paul Strand

Something that I consider 'my invention', since I haven't seen it done anywhere before is 'Super-speed photography'. Now normal high-speed photography involves either a very fast camera at a high frame rate or the act of 'freezing' the motion using flash, while the actual exposure is actually quite long. For much of my high-speed photography with flash I was using shutter speeds of two seconds to give me time to break or shoot whatever my subject was and trigger the flash with a sound activated device. But then I started playing with the idea of using the flash trigger of the camera to actually cause the event. — Desmond Downs

During photography's first decades, exposure times were quite long ... So, similar to the drawings produced with the help of a camera obscura, which depicted reality as static and immobile, early photographs represented the world as stable, eternal, unshakable. — Lev Manovich