Take Time With Your Images

I have always been fascinated by long exposures, going back to Daguerre, with his incredibly long ones. In Figure 1 below, we see a seemingly empty street, with one lone person in the foreground. In reality, the street is empty only because the people were rendered invisible because they moved during exposure. The man in the foreground appears only because he stopped to get his shoes shined.

Figure 1.In this image by Daguerre (1839) any movement on the street was rendered transparent due to the long exposure of the Daguerreotype plate.The man in the foreground is the first person ever captured in a photograph.
In early processes, lack of speed was a handicap. Exposures were necessarily long, making images such as portraits hard to render without movement. We think of 19th century portraits as being stiff and formal, with sour faces and poor disposition. This was a function of the length of exposure. People had to sit still or be blurred. Smiles are spontaneous, so weren't seen in por...