Why Long Exposures Fall Apart and What to Shoot Instead

Weather can wreck a plan fast, especially when you packed for long exposures and wake up to wind and rain. This video shows how to salvage a shot when the light refuses to cooperate.

Coming to you from Serge Ramelli Photography, this rain-soaked video follows a real day of problem-solving on Ocean Drive, with the Leica Q3 acting as the quick-draw option and the Sony a7R V reserved for slower, tripod-based frames. You watch him start with a simple truth: sometimes the morning is a wash, and the smartest move is to stop fighting it. Later, when the rain eases but the wind stays, he leans into what the conditions still give him, like graphic shapes, shade, and controlled contrast. He walks you through a black-and-white look that depends on shooting from darkness and pulling exposure down hard, then explains when it falls apart in open light. You also see why he carries two cameras on the same outing, not as a flex, but as a way to stay fast when the scene changes every few minutes.

The most useful parts are the small decisions that keep a scene from getting messy. Ramelli points out how harsh light turns sand and wood into distraction factories, then shifts position until the frame quiets down. He keeps circling, rejecting compositions that almost work, and he says it out loud when a shot fails, which is what you need to hear when you’re stuck in your own loop. He talks about flare in a practical way: move an inch, change the result, then choose the version that keeps the highlight under control. He also works with a “frame within a frame” idea on the street, and you get a clear sense of how he builds a photo around structure first, not around whatever landmark happens to be nearby. There’s a quick nod to Schaller’s high-contrast approach, but the real takeaway is how deliberately he chooses darkness as the starting point when the day looks flat.

Once he’s back on Ocean Drive, the video turns into a timing lesson, and it gets tense in a good way. He names the blue-hour window as the target, watches the sky shift minute by minute, and adjusts exposure lengths as the ambient level drops. You see him bounce between long and short exposures, swapping decisions based on motion, traffic, and how quickly the sky is losing detail, with the tripod and an ND filter coming in and out as needed. He talks about people and cars without drama, focusing on distance and placement instead of pretending the street will empty itself for you. When the light hits the narrow “sweet spot,” he moves fast, then checks sharpness at 100% before he changes anything, eyes scanning the file like he expects it to betray him. Later, he pushes into night work with stars, a bright moon, and moving clouds, then experiments with exposure times to see what actually shows up in the sky, using a simple focus trick that relies on a small light source.

The edit and retouch section is where he starts hinting at his finishing workflow, but he does not hand you the whole recipe. He demonstrates quick changes inside Lightroom, including removing people and dialing in a cleaner look with a preset-based starting point, then he mentions the checks he makes so blacks and whites don’t get crushed. He also shows how a scene that looks ordinary in-camera can shift once the tones are set and the crop is locked, especially when the frame is built around neon, leading lines, and a clean foreground anchor. He’s blunt about what he hates in a frame, like ugly footprints or a bright patch that steals attention, and he keeps hunting for a version that feels “sellable” without turning it into a lecture. The pacing stays honest: waiting, missing, adjusting, and catching a short window before it disappears again. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Ramelli.