Recently I noticed that the colours on my old photographs have faded. They were taken using my old Canon EOS 500 SLR film camera, and the colour of the film has changed as well. I am worried that I will loss these pictures sooner or later, so I have asked my brother to scan the photos for me using his newly bought all-in-one machine (Printer + Scanner + Fax).

The first scanned picture shown above was taken using a special technique. I zoomed the lense while the shutter was left opened. The exposure time was less than 10 seconds. I think I can only be able to produce this type of photo again with a DSLR instead of with my dream camera Canon PowerShot S6 IS. I don’t think a prosumer camera has the programable Power-Zoom feature to create this special effect.

Do you notice that the line zooming toward the center is actually shaking. It’s because I zoomed the lense by rotating the zoom-control on the lense, and even though the camera was stabilized on a tripod, I still couldn’t avoid it. I believe only a very high end professional camera has this feature that allows zooming automatically while the shutter is opened. The camera must be programmable such as after x seconds the shutter is opened, it should start changing its zoom from focal point y to another focal point z, and solving the focus problem by locking the focus in all different zoom power.

May be some camera allow you to zoom the lense while the shutter is opened, but you still have to touch the T/W button or rotate the control on the lense mechanically (usually clockwise or counter clockwise) to zoom, and the line won’t be perfect. It will still produce a shaky line.

So if you come across any camera with programmable-zoom feature, please let me know.

This is a typical long exposure photo taken from a car when the car is moving. It absorbed all the light on the street. It’s very easy to produre this type of photo. You just need to reduce the aperture size and increase the exposure time and hold your camera on a stable tripod.

You can read the following post for more night photos using my digital camera, they are different because they were taken using a digital camera.

Light in the Night 3
Light in the Night 2
Light in the Night 1

When I use digital camera to take long exposure photographs, and when the light is moving fast, I noticed that it’s actually become dots instead of lines. I hope someone can tell me the reason for the occurrance of this situation. May be different digital cameras have different “interval time” to let the light paint the photo.

Yes, this post is a bit too technical.