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| Don't Worry about Reciprocity Failure SUMMARY: Reciprocity failure is not a problem with long digital camera exposures - but noise can be.
Film cameras have to deal with a problem called reciprocity failure when it comes to long exposures. This means that as film is exposed for a longer period of time, it becomes less sensitive to light, shifting the color balance.
Luckily, digital cameras don't seem to have that problem as they can handle exposures of multiple seconds or longer without noticing a shift in color.
However, digital cameras do have to deal with the problem of grain (noise) that inherently crops up as stray pixels during longer exposures. How can you fix, or at least minimize, this problem?
* Shoot as fast as possible. Can you get away with a 4 second exposure versus a 16 second exposure by adjusting the depth-of-field (aperture), allowing some of the background to become blurry? This might even be beneficial for artistic effect.
* Use as low an ISO setting as possible. For many digital cameras, ISO settings of 400 and above already add grain to the photo, so try keeping your ISO setting at 100 or lower.
* If your digital camera supports noise-reduction technology, try enabling it and comparing the results with photos taken without this feature. Also, many digital photo editing programs, such as PhotoShop and PhotoPaint, have image adjustment features that can help remove noise.
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