A set of pointers on how to get a good long-exposure night shot using film cameras without wasting tons of film.

This came up the other day on the photo discussion list at work, where one of the guys pointed out one of the many millions of flame wars on the subject and stated that there had to be one correct answer to the question of how the 1 over focal length rule (meaning if you have a 50mm lens, you need to have your shutter at least at 1/50) applies to digital SLRs with crop-factor.

One of my friends was digging her film EOS camera out of storage after shooting digital and she wanted to understand what it was doing, so she asked me what happens when you tell her camera to ignore the DX coding on the back and set things manually.

Why film "looks" better at different speeds, super-high-speed films, dynamic range, and other issues necessary to understand film speeds.

I wrote a blog entry 2 years ago in response to Nikolai's post on the subject and I kinda wanted to return to some of the things covered, since I've done a lot more shooting and understand some of the numerical figures much better...

I like to view what people are hitting my site about so that I can make the content of my site more useful. Sometimes, I'll notice a search that seems to ask a question but I'm not sure if I've got a great answer for it, so here's some short answers...