Low ISO, How Low?

[Vaughn]

The romantic part of me also feels that long exposure and the capturing of time somehow imparts something to an image beyond what we see. Of course the pragmatic part of me knows that I would be hard pressed to tell the difference between two otherwise identical images, one taken at 1/8 second and the other at 8 seconds.

But I ignore the pragmaticist most of the time. I am an artist, not a scientist, after all! LOL!

A back or front mounted packard shutter might be an answer. Some have an "instanteous" setting (1/125?) and I do not know how quickly one can open and close one of those manually...but it would be sub-second.

[Roger Cole]

Efke IR with an opaque IR filter?

Also, I don't know what this thing actually is or the format, but how about paper negatives? There's a thread over in image sharing, and it seems that would be pretty slow.

If you REALLY need S-L-O-W you could use a paper negative of contact paper like Lodima.

No, the Efke is the regular silver one from B&H. Comes in a box of 50, says PL 25 M on the box. The paper negs are something I really want to try at some point, but haven't got around to it. I need to read up on it. As I gain experience and confidence I like to try new things and increase my skills. At the moment I'm just wanting to experiment with the Efke 25 rated ISO 12, or can it go lower than that?


Kent in SD

I think you misunderstood my reference to the IR. I knew you were shooting the regular stuff. I was suggesting shooting the IR with a visually opaque IR filter as a way of getting much, much slower. I think people usually rate this at EI 3 or 6, and I believe that's in sunlight. It would be a lot slower with other sources, possibly completely insensitive, but if you want really slow, it's another step down.

[Tobias Key]

Have you thought of using an ND400 filter? They are primarily for shooting solar eclipses and cut the light by 9 stops.