Canon EOS 40D: Bulb Exposures

Video Transcript

"All right, let's talk about bulb exposure on your Canon 40D. Bulb exposure is basically an unlimited amount of shutter speed. As long as the shutter button is depressed the shutter remains open. As soon as the shutter button is released or your finger is taken off of the shutter button, the shutter is closed. So it's really up to you how long you want the shutter to be open. In order to get into bulb mode, you need to have your camera set to a completely manual mode, up here on the top, make sure that the M is next to your white line on the camera body. And then what you need to do is go ahead and set manually that bulb setting by holding down the shutter button with one finger, and scrolling, excuse me, scrolling on the dial. Oops. Scrolling on the dial all the way down to your lowest, you'll get all the way to thirty seconds. A thirty second shutter speed is a really long time, and just pass that, if you scroll one more click to the right, you end up in bulb setting. And you should have this B-U-L-B show up on your LCD screen, that means you're in bulb. A lot of people use this to take pictures of the night sky or night shots, cars on the road, things that require a really long exposure time. But of course in this setting a lot of light is going to enter your camera, so be sure that you know that there's not - you make just want to take a few test shots. In bulb setting it's going to be difficult to actually activate your shutter because any time you press down on the shutter button, it's going to shake or push the camera a little bit, so, the best thing to do is to have a remote control to access your shutter, to set the shutter, or have a wire-in remote control. There's a couple of different controls that you can use to activate the shutter without actually touching the camera. I will demonstrate here though that if you want to, you can go ahead and press down the shutter button in bulb setting, and the shutter remains open, it's still open until my finger is taken off. And you can see that my picture here is completely white, way overexposed. So in order to get a good exposure with this bulb setting you really want to be outside at night and preferably have a tripod, or some other kind of device to put your camera on to keep it steady and then activate the shutter with a remote control."