There may be times when you might want to use a long exposure, long enough to capture dim light sources like candles or LED’s. Or integrate the warmth of tungsten illumination with your strobe capture. The T2 allows that increase in exposure time needed to capture these kinds of sources. Using Setup>Exposure from the menu bar atop the monitor, choose from Normal, quarter-second, half-second, one second and two second exposure times. If you choose one of these shutter speeds, make sure you have a valid Dark Correct Capture for that speed. Enable the dark capture by pulling down under the menu bar atop the monitor: Setup>Dark Correct>Enable. The longer exposure times on CCD’s generate noise, the longer the exposure, the greater the noise generation. The dark capture helps negate the noise by making a “map” of the noise and subtracting it from subsequent captures. Evaluate the quality of each shutter speed so you can decide when to use the feature. Also look at a capture of each shutter speed without Dark Correct. The noise of each capture can be artistically used so you’ll want to evaluate the maximum noise effect of each exposure speed.
When making long exposures, don’t overlook the value of making two captures and blending them in Photoshop. You can shoot one capture lit normally with strobe and the other capture lit with a weak source, like a candle. You may want to underlight the area in the strobe capture section where the candle is so that after blending the candle appears to light the underlit area.
Two exposures can also be valuable when shooting L.E.D.’s on electronic equipment. Shoot the capture of the product and make sure the area surrounding the LED is low valued enough to make the adjacent color of the burned in LED illumination appear to match your visual interpretation. Save the image to disk. Shoot the LED after you shut down the strobes. You may want to refocus specially for the LED You may want to open the aperture. Change the shutter speed in the Exposure dialog box and make a capture of the LED illumination. Crop the area of interest and save to disk. For naming you might want to label the captures with the product name and add the suffix, A and B or 1 and 2.
Open both files in Photoshop. Make a selection of the illumination. Try the Magic Wand, or Select>Color Range, or Lasso the area and subtract from it using Command+Magic Wand. Clean up any selection by adding or subtracting via the Lasso tool. Once you’ve made a decent selection, copy it to disk (Command+C) and paste it into the strobe lit capture. Drag the pasted imagery until it approximates the area it needs to fill. Increase the zoom and use arrow keys to carefully position the illumination selection. Flatten the paste layer and save the file. Make sure you rename the image to reflect the combined capture. Practice this technique if you shoot stuff that can take advantage of this technique.
This procedure recommends that Photoshop be installed on the capture station computer. Yes, you can save the images to a network for assembly by an imaging staffer. At first the photographer should do the assembly because he can reshoot it much more easily if the composite image doesn’t look quite right. Most shooters will rapidly optimize the time spent on such assembly and when that shooter really has the technique down he can more effectively send the individual parts to another operator for subsequent assembly, knowing the assembly will go easily because of his experience.