Cecil Holmes uses the Tamron SP 24-70mm VC and SP 28-75mm lenses to make time stand still.

By Jenn Gidman
Images by Cecil Holmes

For Cecil Holmes, the beauty of a long-exposure photo lies not just in how it comes out in a technical sense, but also what he's able to expose in a metaphorical sense. "It's about capturing the essence of time in a single-frame image, whether it's seeing the clouds or cars streak by or the movement in the water," he says. "It's like the way I feel being around waterfalls: relaxed and in the moment."

For his long-exposure images, Cecil currently uses the Tamron SP 24-70mm VC and SP 28-75mm lenses, though he's looking forward to soon using the new Tamron SP 15-30mm VC wide-angle lens. "I love taking photos as wide as I can," he says. "That allows me to get as much of the night sky as I can, for example, or as much as the leading lines in my photo as I can. With these two lenses, I can shoot wide but also take advantage of the longer focal lengths that these two lenses offer for greater creativity."

To Cecil, a long-exposure image doesn't have to mean a 30-minute marathon session under the stars. "To me, a long exposure is anything you can't handhold for a sharp image," Cecil explains. "I take a lot of pictures that are a second or half a second that I wouldn't be able to do without my tripod, so I consider those long-exposure images."

Cecil prefers to head out during sunrise and sunset times for his long-exposure photos; for his night photos, picking a spot with minimal light pollution is optimal, as is a clear sky with few clouds so he can see the stars. If he's venturing out to photograph waterfalls in the daytime, he hopes for cloudy, overcast skies.

Some cameras have a Bulb mode that allows you to hold your shutter open for as long as you want, which you should use if you're planning on an exposure of 30 seconds or more (Cecil's camera enters that mode automatically after that amount of time has passed). "For the pictures I take that are four or five minutes long, I go into Bulb mode," he says. "In those cases, I'll use a shutter release cable to keep everything steady. If it's going to be 30 seconds or less, or if I just don't feel like getting the cable out of my bag, I'll simply use the self-timer."

To minimize the noise in his photos, Cecil turns off the noise-reduction feature. "It costs me time when I'm doing these long exposures," he say. "If I take a 30-second exposure, then the camera takes another 30 seconds to process the image with the noise reduction. I can get more pictures in by turning the noise reduction off and just dealing with any noise in Lightroom later, if it's even an issue at all."

South Carolina's Folly Beach Fishing Pier is the second-longest pier on the East Coast, reaching 1,045 feet into the Atlantic. Sunrise at the pier was the ideal time for Cecil to experiment with his long-exposure water photos. "This was a 30-second image taken at F/16, ISO 100, in the moment right before the sun came up," he says. "I just tried to time it so I was able to capture the streaks of the waves crashing in and rolling back out. A lot of times that just comes down to luck and timing—you just have to keep trying until you get the wave pattern you like."

When he's photographing waterfalls (one of his favorite long-exposure subjects) with his 24-70, Cecil is consistent in how he approaches composition. "I try to find something to anchor the foreground, whether it's a smaller cascade, a rock, or a log," he says. "Then I just use basic composition rules, like the rule of thirds or leading lines to bring the viewer through the image."

If he doesn't luck out with the weather during his waterfall sessions, Cecil will often use a 10-stop neutral-density filter, "though I generally have to go 11 stops over to get the exposure the way I want it," he says. "If I go just 10 stops, it's usually a stop or so underexposed. I'll just try out a certain shutter speed and go from there. Sometimes I'll make the shutter speed longer or shorter, other times I'll keep the shutter speed the same and raise or lower the ISO. It's a lot of experimentation with these types of images."

For a couple of long-exposure night shots taken with the 24-70, Cecil headed out to Yellowstone National Park, where he captured the water plume of White Dome Geyser. "I selected that geyser for a reason, because it has the most frequent schedule—it erupts anywhere from every 15 to 45 minutes," he says. "Basically we went out there and sat for a couple of hours; I may have gotten three or four shots during that time."

When he does long-exposure star photos like this, he generally starts at the same baseline, which is to shoot as wide open as his lens can go (F/2.8 in these cases), with a starting ISO of 1600 and a 30-second shutter speed. "If the image needs to be brighter or darker, I'll usually adjust the ISO and leave the aperture and shutter speed alone," he says.

One of the unusual aspects of this long-exposure photo was how it captured a phenomenon called airglow, a photochemical reaction in the atmosphere that makes the sky appear different colors. "When I took this photo, I thought the multicolored sky may have been the northern lights," Cecil says. "But I was talking to some friends of mine with a lot more astronomical sense than I, and they told me about the airglow. The interesting thing is, I didn't see it with my naked eye—it only showed up in the camera."

Another geyser right down the road from White Dome Geyser gave Cecil the chance to capture a starry-night reflection. "This geyser actually only erupts every 36 hours, so chances were slim I'd get that geyser in the photo, but I had to ride right by it to get to White Dome and I thought the reflections were cool," he says. "I exposed for about 30 seconds here (I don't remember having to go into Bulb mode). When I do go into Bulb mode, there's a bit of math involved—if I don't have my phone with the calculator on it, the calculations start to lose me after a while!"

The Jackson Street Bridge used to be an Atlanta secret, but now it's a well-known spot to capture what's known as the "quintessential Atlanta view": the downtown skyline. "Anyone who wants to take nighttime downtown pictures goes to this bridge," Cecil says. "I headed over there one evening with my 28-75, just after the sun went down, so it was already dark. I just had to wait for the right amount of traffic to come through to get those neat taillight streaks. I took this photo at F/8 with a 20-second exposure. It was the perfect way to show the city bustling at night."

To see more of Cecil Holmes' work, go to www.cecilsphotos.com.