Foolography Community

I have just started to experiment with the new Unleashed 22 and I want to shoot long exposures in BULB mode. Is there a way to set exact seconds / minutes, e.g. 45sec or 1min? I have just found a scroll menu which allows me to select fixed times at odd settings, such as 37sec, 1:04 min, etc. I can switch between these settings or switch ND filter settings, but I haven't found a way to manually set seconds and minutes.
I am using a Sony A7R IV camera.
Any help is appreciated.
Greetings, Thomas

Hi Thomas,

While those Long Exposure values look like total random combinations of hours, minutes and seconds, there's a very good reason for that:

They are a continuation of the 1/3rd stop steps that all cameras already use!

This makes the calculations for ND filters unnecessary - one stop is simply scrolling up by three values in the picker!

I know that a lot of photographers would like to set specific values in minutes and seconds, but we're quite certain that 90% simple would only like to do so, because that's what they're used to. In most cases, 1/3rd stop steps are actually more useful. The interesting thing is that as the exposures get longer, the difference in time to achieve just 1/3rd of a stop of exposure difference, becomes huge - the two longest values we support are 3:37h and 4:33h -that's almost an hour longer, for just 1/3rd of a stop. This shows that the actual minutes or seconds make no real difference.

However, when you do a long exposure, you can always stop the exposure earlier, so you can achieve other values than the ones we offer.

I know that there are a few genuine cases where you want an exact time outside our 1/3rd stop values, but in our opinion, they're few and far between.

Do you have a specific reason for wanting such fine control, now that you know why we chose those odd looking values?

Yes there is a reason why I want to be able to select exact time settings. I shoot many landscape and panorama long exposures and I am always targeting for the "explosion" effects of moving clouds. From experience I have some reference exposure times that will give a good dramatic cloud effect at different wind speeds. So I always look at the wind speed and choose exposure time first and then select ND value, ISO and aperture settings afterwards., to match the exposure time for the wind speed. Those odd time settings in the Unleashed app just don't fit my reference exposure times that I need for the moving clouds effect at different wind speeds.

Hmm, is there really such a difference from your reference values to the ones available in the Unleashed? Could you give us some examples? The rest of what you explain is exactly the kind of thing we were aiming to make easier for the photographer:

Lets say your reference value is 3 minutes, but the closest values we offer are 2:41 or 3:23.
The great thing about these values is that you can use the Long exposure setting to set the ND filter you're thinking of using, set that in the app, - lets say ND 6.0. Scroll back to the 3:23m value. Then you can scroll the ND setting back to 0.0, and the app will set the shutterspeed to 3.2s, which you can then use to check your other exposure settings, using your camera's meter! No calculators needed ;-)

So, preferences aside - are your references really that precise that the result wouldn't be just as great with a few seconds shorter or longer, with the advantage of more precise and easier exposure calculation?