Atta Kim is young photographer who is making a big splash. Currently he is being exibited at the International Center of Photography in NYC. This exhibit was recently profiled in the NY Times. His technique is to take extremely long exposures, 8 hours, even 20 hours. His stuff is very interesting. I am seeking information about how such a long exposure is taken. I have no idea how to take such a photograph. Any information would be appreciated. If you are interested see atta kim: On Air at www.icp.org

I saw Kim's exhibit a week or so ago and I found most of his work very impressive. Many of his shots seem to be composites of large numbers of individual images, probably combined in Photoshop. The ones of the DMZ are the ones that may be terrifically long exposures. I don't know what camera he used, but my guess would be that he used a very low ISO number, tiny aperture, and maybe heaps of ND filters. But since he does combine multiple images in other prints, he may simply have taken a whole series of more normal-length exposures, one right after the other. If he filled a memory card with 4-second exposures while the camera was on a rock-solid tripod, combining them would look like one heck of a long time exposure.

I'm sure he doesn't do his stuff hand-held!

Very interesting. I hope someone else can offer more authoritative information than my speculations.

Eric

P.S. The other current shows at the ICP are well worth a visit (Atget, Weegee, etc.). They have good shows there.

Indeed some of the images are put together in PS but many others are in fact very long exposures. The photo of the coupld having sex is a one hour exposure and the shot of park avenue is an 8 hour exposure. I suppose your are correct that lots of ND filters are used.

I was intrigued by the shots with traffic light in them as you would expect over an 8 hour period all 3 lights to show, when that is not the case.
Oddly in one shot the lights in further back appear red and the foreground light is green, when you would hope they would be the same.
It's probably that the green does not seem as obvious on the rear lights and the red bulb had gone in the near rlight, but still a bit odd.

Thanks for bringing him to attention. I really like his stuff and have bought his book recently (the On Air one). Next to Grandmaster Gursky he is one of my favourite artists!

O.

Do any of his books, to your knowledge, shed any light on his techniques for such long exposures? I am looking for technical informatlion useful to produce such photos. By the way your web site has some great photography!

Thank you Tom..always learning..

He basically uses two types of techniques, stacking exposures and stacking nd filters. He does not really go into detail on how exactly he does what. The camera he uses is an 8x10. I like the stacked filter photos best. He has exposures of up to 24 hours, many are "only" 8 hours, though. I can sadly only go up to 15 or 30 secs with my Sigma but I heard the Canon cams allow for exposures up to 1 hour. If you have one I'd really like to see a 1 hr daylight exposure but that would surely require a vast amount of filters..

If I am not missing anything here then if you get 1/80 @F4 on an overcast day that would be 0,4secs@F22..to get to six secs youd need roughly four less stops of light...to get to one hour..hmm you'd probably need to bury the cam...
But if there is any success let me know, would be interesting to see.

REgards,
O.

Interesting Work!

Regards
Danijela

Now that i am finally registered (had issues with registration), i can contribute! yay!

anyways, this is my first post - so dont bash me please....

Not to be pigging on my blog, but referencing it saves me typing it again....feel free to check out my blog entry about this here - http://www.8thcross.com/blog/?p=148

Feel free to use the resource i have in the site as well - i have developed a sheet to help those wishing to try out those extra long exposures!


Disclaimer: I am not an expert in these things - feel free to agree/dis-agree.

great work Umesh I just downloaded that table. So I reckon on a cloudy day I can get from 1/60 to 15s with one of those 10-stop filters.. 15s is the longest I can do with my camera to keep the result OK. Might make for some interesting shots on traffic lights, train stations etc..Do you have made any so far?

O.

Thanks Ollivr,
Yes, i have used the table and made some images - i will post some links to it soon - they are not online yet (havent had time to process them yet). If you realize that by just stacking a NDx8 filter (3 stop) you can significantly up the number from 15s to 2 hours!

Here is another photographer who uses long exposures.
http://www.komossa.net/view/21
His exposure times can stretch to 7 or 8 hours. He describes his profession as "standing around all night and guarding the camera". quoted from ArtNews Magazine, January, 2007.

Merrill

That crossed my mind as being an important part of Atta Kim's technique. He could hardly leave a camera and tripod standing unguarded for 8 hours on a NY city street corner...