How to Take Stunning Long Exposure Photos with iPhone

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Long exposure photos are a great art form and can show a landscape in interesting ways. While it’s a simple exercise to set up a DSLR or mirrorless camera to take long exposures, photographers shooting on an iPhone may wonder how to do long exposure on iPhone cameras.

iPhonography is the art and craft of making amazing photographs with Apple iPhones. Though a smartphone camera doesn’t necessarily have all of the options and native features of a more traditional camera, there are apps for taking photos and processing them that are able to let you create some of the same style of images you can do with those larger cameras.

Besides regular photos and videos, you can do long exposure on iPhones, macro photography, selective focus portraits, and action photography on iPhones. Before discussing how to do long exposure on iPhones, let’s have a brief tutorial on long exposure photography in general.

What is Long Exposure?

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What is long exposure, and can you do long exposure on iPhone cameras? The answer to the second part of that question is yes, depending on what iPhone and what camera app you have.

The answer to the 1st part of that question requires some knowledge of general photographic techniques and principles. The Exposure Triangle is the main part of figuring out how to do long exposure on iPhone cameras and any other type of camera.

The three variables that determine exposure are the shutter speed, lens aperture (f-stop), and ISO. Changing any one of the three requires a change of one or both of the others. So, if you want a very long shutter speed, you will need to adjust the lens aperture and ISO a lot to get a very long exposure time.

What Is Long Exposure Used For?

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There are two main reasons I like using long exposure techniques, motion blur and astrophotography. If you’ve been following Photography Talk for any length of time, you know that I am a huge fan of blurred water effects and of making night sky images.

Blurred water effects can turn a beautiful landscape image into a special work of art. Whether a river, stream, waterfall, or wave-filled ocean, blurred water technique transforms the water into a very different scene.

We see most water movement in a unique way with our own eyes. We see an endless stream of still images of the water, noticing the individual ‘poses’ of water as well as the entirety of the scene in motion.

Though photography mimics how our brain interprets the information our eyes provide and allows us to ‘see’ and understand what is in front of us, it can’t capture exactly how our eye-brain connection functions.

Photography will capture a stop motion image of the water where individual drops and the larger masses of water will be seen in a freeze-frame style of visualization. This looks neat, but we sometimes want to enhance a scene with moving water in it without having our attention arrested by the camera arresting the motion of the water. That’s how the water blurring effect is often used.

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We can also use this same method to blur the motion of clouds in a scene. Which I find interesting since clouds are actually made of water vapor, so cloud blurring is still water blurring. Oceanside scenic images can include water blurring of the waves as well as any blurring of cloud movement.

The reason I want to use long exposure on iPhone cameras when I’m out doing photography treks without my other cameras is because I’m not always carrying my main cameras. This is why I really do like iPhones and other smartphones with their amazing cameras built-in. Even when I don’t have my camera on me, I always have a high-quality camera on me if I have an iPhone or other high-quality smartphone.

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As my second listed reason for using long exposure, astrophotography is a favorite art form for many outdoor photographers. It combines a love of photography with an interest in astronomy, a situation which is true for a lot of landscape photographers and nature lovers in general.

Astrophotography is an interesting craft, too. The huge, dark expanses of the night sky are punctuated by intensely beautiful and brilliant points of light or softly glowing ephemeral wisps and clouds of glowing luminosity. You can do this type of long exposure on iPhone cameras, too, though it does have some challenges.

A major challenge for astrophotography is that large space of dark with light sources embedded within it. And that’s what makes astrophotography so hard to understand at times. We’re basically capturing light sources instead of objects lit by a light source. This is true of nebulae and planets, too, since these are behaving as light modifiers and reflectors, besides all of the stars emitting their own light.

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Some other reasons for wanting to do long exposure on iPhone cameras are low light situations such as concerts, stage shows, weddings, sunset, twilight, Blue Hour, Golden Hour, indoor scenes, and street photography.

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How Long-Exposure Photography Works

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We know what long exposure photography accomplishes, now let’s see how it works.

In order to get long exposure effects such as blurred water or clouds, we have to be able to keep the shutter open for an appreciable amount of time, generally in the range of full seconds or even minutes instead of fractions of a second.

The way to achieve a very long shutter speed is tied up with our Exposure Triangle. If we simply increase the time the shutter is open without somehow adjusting the other two legs of that triangle, we’ll get overexposure to the point of not seeing anything in the image.

Stopping down the lens and lowering the ISO or sensor sensitivity will get us only so far if the scene has an average brightness level. So, special light attenuation filters, neutral density filters, are used to lower the light intensity of what is coming through the lens and into the camera.

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Density, in a photographic sense, is darkness. Neutral means having no color cast, no tint. So a neutral density filter is often a dark gray filter. Neutral density (ND) filters are rated by how many stops (or steps) of exposure it is able to attenuate the existing light level.

Each full change of shutter speed, f-stop, or ISO is a full stop change of exposure. Each stop changes up or down by either halving or doubling the value. A lens aperture or f-stop of f/4 allows half of the light of f/2.8 but double the amount of f/5.6, for instance. Same with a shutter speed of 1/125th compared to 1/60th or 1/250th, and ISO values of 100 compared to 50 or 200. These are calculations and values we’re used to as photographers, so it is easy to apply it to ND filters.

Some of the most common ND filters are 3-stop, 6-stop, and 10-stop densities. To give examples of how that enables long exposure photography, an exposure of 1/125th at f/5.6 and ISO 400 can be changed quite a bit.

To start, we would change that ISO to a lower sensitivity such as 100, which gives two stops of difference, allowing a shutter speed of 1/30th. If we also stop down the lens aperture to f/16, that’s an additional 3 stops of difference, yielding us a shutter speed of 1/4th of a second.

That still isn’t long enough to give us those awesome blurred water effects, though it would just blur moving water a little bit. We need full seconds for true blurred effects. So, we add the ND filters.

A 3 stop filter with the situation outlined above would result in 2 seconds, a 6 stop filter gets us to 16 seconds, and a 10 stop filter gets us all the way to 256 seconds or 4 mins and 16 seconds. The 6 and 10 stop ND filters are thus extremely valuable for blurred water long exposure effects.

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Astrophotography won’t require that we use ND filters, but the exposure times may be just as long or even longer. A lot of astrophotography is done with multiple exposures, either bracketing or stacking. Bracketing can need some very long exposure times. Image stacking also uses up a lot of time, and then we blend them together with post-processing software.

Any way you look at it, long exposure photography calls for keeping the shutter open for a long time. Even if we’re simply shooting a street scene or concert in low light and not seeking the special effects of blurred water or astrophotography, the ability to have longer shutter speeds and perhaps special metering modes is very important.

Can iPhones Take Long-Exposure Photos?

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Now that we’re all on the same page concerning the needs and desired results of long exposure photography, the question we’re all wondering is, can we do long exposure on iPhone cameras?

The answer is Yes. No. Maybe, it depends…

Basically, every iPhone has a good camera in it. They have high-quality lenses, good sensors, and very capable camera apps built-in. These camera apps and the hardware in the iPhone itself just keep getting better and more fully-featured. As for those general low light situations such as weddings, concerts, street photography, all of the iPhone models will do a pretty good job, with the newest ones being better.

Astrophotography and blurred water effects may or may not be supported by your particular iPhone. Check your phone camera settings to see if it allows manually setting very long exposure times.

For older models of iPhones, you may need to download a different camera app that offers more control, such as manually setting those long times. Some of those apps may be free, but most of the better ones require some payment, though the dollar amounts are pretty small.

How to Shoot Long Exposure on iPhone

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Answering the questions above will point you in the right direction for how to shoot long exposure on iPhone cameras. The newer iPhones and many of those replacement apps for older iPhone cameras have image stabilization enabling handheld shooting at slightly lower light levels, such as what will be found at concerts and in street photography.

The very long exposure on iPhone cameras for blurred water and clouds or astrophotography will put all of us completely out of the range of any image stabilization software. The exposure times for these images are full seconds, minutes even.

So, in order to take a long exposure on iPhone cameras of those types of images, we will need to have some form of camera support. For a full-size camera, we would probably take out our tripod. Since the iPhone is a super-compact camera, we can use a tripod alternative such as the OctoPad.

OctoPad is an ingenious device for camera support. It’s small and easy to transport yet can keep our camera or smartphone rock steady. It is a stiff disc of stuffed material with a non-slip pad underneath and a ¼-20 screw mount ball head on top.

It can hold your camera on almost any surface indoors or out at up to a 45-degree angle. Place your OctoPad and iPhone down on the brick wall, tree stump, car hood, or whatever is there, and then adjust the ball head to point the iPhone in the right direction. You can now take a long exposure on iPhone cameras of up to several minutes with no camera movement at all.

You can also find some very practical filters and filter holders for many of the newest iPhone cameras, so you can add those ND filters in order to take a long exposure on iPhone cameras.

Long Exposure on iPhone Camera Post-Processing

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After all of your hard work setting up and taking the long exposure on iPhone cameras, now you need to post-process it properly to get the best results. Since the newer iPhone cameras actually have RAW image file capability, this is pretty much just like using your larger cameras.

A lot of current post-processing programs can handle these RAW files in addition to the JPEG files of older images using long exposure on iPhone cameras.

Plus, Apple has some very full-featured post-processing and special effect programs of their own. Some are included in the newest iPhones, while others are available as downloadable apps.

Yes, you can take long exposure on iPhone cameras. Check out your personal iPhone for what is already available, download apps and buy a support, and then go out and take a long exposure on iPhone.