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Home » Cameras and Lenses

What Is Bulb Mode in Photography?

Bulb mode lets you take ultra-long exposures with ease. The tips below show how to use it the right way.

By Spencer Cox 13 Comments

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Snow mountaintop with stars - bulb mode allowed me to use a shutter speed longer than two minutes, creating star trails that make this photo successful.
With bulb mode, I used a shutter speed of 2.25 minutes to capture stars “raining” over the Southern Alps.
NIKON D800E + 70-200mm f/4 @ 86mm, ISO 100, 136 seconds, f/5.6

Photographers often feel frustrated by the 30-second shutter speed limit on many cameras. What they may not realize is that there is an easy way around this limitation – if you know how to use it. The solution is known as bulb mode.

Table of Contents

  • What Is Bulb Mode on Your Camera?
  • Accessing Bulb Mode
  • How to Use Bulb Shutter Speeds
  • How to Capture Tack-Sharp Long Exposures
  • Bulb vs Time Exposure Mode
  • Image Noise with Long Exposure Photography
  • Conclusion

What Is Bulb Mode on Your Camera?

Bulb mode is simply a shutter speed option that you can select in Manual mode on your camera. It allows your shutter speed to be any length you choose: one second, one minute, 17 minutes, or anything else.

The key with bulb mode is that your camera’s shutter stays open for as long as you hold down the shutter release button. The limit on your Bulb exposure depends on the camera – sometimes 30 minutes, sometimes as long as you like (or until your battery dies).

This Milky Way photo would not have been possible without bulb mode, since it has an extremely long exposure of more than 14 minutes.
I took this photo (from an astro tracker) with an ultra long shutter speed – a whopping 14 minutes, 20 seconds.
NIKON Z7 + 24-70mm f/4 S @ 24mm, ISO 64, 860 seconds, f/4.0

Accessing Bulb Mode

Not all cameras have bulb mode today, but most DSLRs and mirrorless cameras do. This includes nearly every Nikon, Canon, Sony, Fuji, Olympus, and Pentax DSLR or mirrorless camera on the market.

It is easy to check if your camera has a bulb mode. Turn your camera to Manual, and shift your shutter speed as long as it can go. Usually, after the 30 second mark, your camera will show the letter “B” as your shutter speed. This is your bulb mode!

How to Use Bulb Shutter Speeds

If you’ve never used bulb mode before, you may be confused why the “B” option appears to take very short exposures. For example, say that you have bulb mode enabled and you simply press the shutter release like normal. In that case, you will only capture an exposure of a fraction of a second.

This is because bulb mode requires that you hold down the camera’s shutter release button during the entire exposure. If you hold down the shutter button for 45 seconds, that will be your exposure. But if you simply press and release the shutter button like normal, you may get a 1/2 second exposure or even less.

Generally, there is no reason to use bulb mode if you are under 30 seconds (or whatever your camera’s longest native shutter speed may be). The main exception is if you are photographing stars at night, and you want to be very precise about your shutter speed in order to avoid star trails. But even this is usually overkill.

One big problem remains: Pressing down on the camera’s shutter button in bulb mode almost always shakes the camera and introduces blur. That is simply because your hands themselves inevitably shake; even with the steadiest tripod on the market, you’re likely to get blurry photos if you use bulb mode like this.

So, what can you do about it? The next section covers the easiest solution.

This photo shows rock carvings at Petra taken at night with a long exposure of 262 seconds.
Here, bulb mode allowed Nasim to capture a bright image at Petra well before sunrise. © Nasim Mansurov
NIKON Z 7 + NIKKOR Z 35mm f/1.8 S @ 35mm, ISO 64, 262 seconds, f/4.0

How to Capture Tack-Sharp Long Exposures

Often, the best solution to avoid blurry exposures in Bulb is not to touch your camera at all while it’s taking a picture. Instead, trigger your camera to take a photo using a remote shutter release!

Every popular camera on the market today has a compatible remote shutter release. Here’s the simplest one for Nikon D3000, D5000, and D7000 series cameras (excluding the D3500, which doesn’t have an IR sensor and is controlled via your smartphone instead). Here’s the comparable option for most Canon DSLRs, including the Rebel lineup.

If you have a different camera, it is trivial to search for your desired remote shutter release here. Just type your camera name followed by “remote release.”

Some of these remotes are wireless (infrared) while others are wired cables. You can also buy certain remotes with additional options for time lapses and other specialty photography. If bulb photography is your only goal, however, it does not matter; any cable release on the market will let you use bulb mode the proper way – without touching the camera.

Note that some remote releases have a locking mechanism to hold down the external shutter button automatically as long as you like. Others allow one press to start the exposure and a second press to end it. A few cameras even have a bulb mode that you can trigger from your phone, if you so desire.

Regardless – by using bulb mode with an external remote, you are no longer touching your camera during the exposure. That way, you can capture extremely sharp ultra-long exposure photos with ease.

Bulb mode helps for long exposure astrophotography, such as in this image of the Orion Nebula.
Bulb mode is useful for astrophotography, especially for long exposures from an equatorial mount.
NIKON D810 + 300mm f/4 @ 420mm, ISO 1600, 44 seconds, f/5.6

Bulb vs Time Exposure Mode

A few cameras today have something even better than bulb mode, called time mode. In this case, you don’t need to hold down the shutter release button at all. You simply need to press the shutter button once to start the exposure, and again to end it.

I don’t know why every camera on the market does not have this extremely useful feature, but that’s the way things are. Luckily, many new cameras today have this option, even some less expensive cameras like the Nikon D5600. If your camera has a time exposure mode, there are few reasons to use the standard Bulb option any longer. Time Mode has all the same benefits without the drawback of using a remote shutter release.

Time Mode is accessed exactly the same as bulb mode – by going beyond a 30 second shutter speed in manual mode. Cameras with a time exposure option generally label it as “T.”

This photo used the Nikon Z7's Time exposure mode (similar to Bulb) to take a long exposure of 132 seconds.
The Nikon Z7 has a “Time” exposure mode, which Nasim used here for a long exposure © Nasim Mansurov
NIKON Z7 + NIKKOR Z 24-70mm f/4 S @ 49mm, ISO 200, 132 seconds, f/4.0

Image Noise with Long Exposure Photography

I love using bulb mode and time mode in dark conditions. The results you’ll get beyond the ordinary 30 second limit are often incredible. But you do need to watch out when your shutter speeds are too long, especially several minutes or more. If you’re not careful, your image quality can suffer.

Specifically, camera sensors heat up quite a bit if your exposure is long enough – the very reason to use Bulb exposures in the first place. This heat translates to image noise. This “thermal noise” is less pronounced if you are shooting in cold conditions, but it still pops up eventually. On top of that, because your exposure is so long, any hot or stuck pixels on your camera sensor will appear exaggerated.

The easy solution is to avoid ultra-long exposures, especially longer than 8-10 minutes, but that’s not always feasible. If you really need extreme shutter speeds like this, you have a couple options.

First, you could enable something called Long Exposure Noise Reduction on your camera. That setting causes your camera to take a second exposure after your bulb mode shot – this time with the camera shutter closed, resulting in a dark frame. Your camera will then subtract the second frame from the first, decreasing some thermal noise and minimizing hot pixels.

This image shows a hot pixel from a real-world landscape photo. Long exposures tend to have many more hot pixels than ordinary images.
The image has a hot pixel in the center. Long exposure images will have more and more of these.

But long exposure noise reduction means your camera spends twice as long taking each picture, since it literally captures two photos each time. That’s not ideal when you’re already shooting 10 minute exposures or more.

Instead, some photographers will take a series of shorter exposures – still using Bulb or Time exposure modes – in combination with a slightly higher ISO. They’ll wait a moment from shot to shot so the camera can cool down. With this technique, you can average out the image noise in software like Adobe Photoshop. It is a way to “simulate” extra long exposures without actually taking them. However, it’s also a bit of an advanced technique. You may be better off sticking with single-image Bulb photos until you’ve practiced it a bit.

Conclusion

Hopefully you found this article on bulb mode to be useful, especially if you are just starting out in long exposure photography. The world looks completely different with multi-minute exposures. It’s something I think everyone should try at some point – regardless of your genre of photography.

That said, you need to do it right. It’s easy to get blurry photos in bulb mode if you don’t use a remote shutter release. And, if your shutter speed gets especially long, you’ll need to keep an eye out for image noise and minimize it if possible (potentially with long exposure noise reduction or image stacking).

At the end of the day, bulb and time modes are great tools in a photographer’s kit. If you have any questions or recommendations on how to use them effectively, please let me know below!

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Filed Under: Cameras and Lenses Tagged With: Camera Settings, Shutter Speed, Long Exposure Photography

About Spencer Cox

Spencer Cox is a landscape and nature photographer who has gained international recognition and awards for his photography. He has been displayed in galleries worldwide, including the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History and exhibitions in London, Malta, Siena, and Beijing. To view more of his work, visit his website or follow him on Facebook and 500px. Read more about Spencer here.

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Jonathon
    July 15, 2019 at 1:13 pm

    Thank you for the helpful tutorial, but let us lament that bulb and time modes alike are obsolete anachronisms in the digital era. As a mountaineer always trying to minimize gear weight, forcing me to couple it with a remote release is doubly insulting.

    The concept obviously made sense in the film era because they could only put so many physical notches in the shutter speed dial. But now, with the shutter speed dial mediated by software, what the camera ought to do is just let you roll the dial past 30″, or 60″, or whatever, and then barf out a user interface with a little keypad. “OK just TELL ME how long you want the exposure to be…” This would be superior to bulb in that you wouldn’t need a remote release, and superior to time mode in that you wouldn’t need to babysit the camera while monitoring a stopwatch.

    Reply
    • Rashad Hurani
      July 17, 2019 at 10:27 am

      Fully agreed! In this era of a computer on a rice grain costing .01 cent, it is a shame to waste our time/effort/intellect on such minuscule stuff

      Reply
  2. Rich
    July 15, 2019 at 2:53 pm

    Interesting article at least to me as I haven’t taken a 30 min exposure in 30 years. :)
    Back then I had Kodak guides to help figure out the exposure time. Today with digital if I needed a long exposure where do I go for guidance as to exposure time?

    Reply
  3. J Frank Laird
    July 15, 2019 at 4:14 pm

    Where exactly did the word “bulb” figure in when naming this shutter speed? Flash bulbs? Strobe lights indoors?

    Reply
    • William
      July 15, 2019 at 5:23 pm

      Early on cameras were not equipped with mechanically timed shutters. Many studio and portrait cameras had Packard shutters. Packard shutters are controlled by air pressure supplied with a short hose and a black rubber “Bulb”. It is from this bulb this mode received it’s name. As long as pressure was applied to the bulb the shutter was open. [With wet chemistry and early film it was up to the photographer to control the length of the exposure. With skill 1/10th to 1/50th of a second is possible with this system.]

      Reply
      • David Powell
        July 16, 2019 at 2:03 pm

        Thanks ever so… I love esoteric historical detail. I must confess – I always assumed it was something to do with flash bulbs, or maybe flash powder…

        Reply
  4. M. Currie
    July 15, 2019 at 11:42 pm

    One thing worth mentioning is that on Nikon cameras which use the infrared remote release, remote use changes Bulb mode to Time mode. One press of the button to open the shutter, another to close it. The D3200 does this even though it does not have a “T” setting, and the D7100, although it has a “T” setting, still does it when it’s set to “B.” I don’t know about others, but I am guessing they are similar.

    That’s a very handy feature, especially since the IR remote is very inexpensive.

    While I can see the virtue of a keypad for choosing long exposure times, an indefinite time exposure is still what you want for some things, such as lightning or fireworks, when you don’t know exactly when things will occur.

    Reply
    • Rich
      July 16, 2019 at 4:25 pm

      With extended exposures of several minutes or more I don’t believe an error of a couple of seconds either way will make any significant difference in the final exposure.
      A n IR remote and a timer should be all you’d need. LOL a ‘Betty Crocker’ kitchen timer fits in your pocket and will wake the dead when the time is up.

      Reply
  5. David Powell
    July 16, 2019 at 2:41 pm

    I’m always happy to look through a well illustrated article, even when I feel that I already “know all this stuff”. But now I find that I do not understand why, apparently, I should slightly raise my ISO in order to shoot a group of shorter exposures for combining in Photoshop…
    Here’s hoping its a simpole explanation!

    Reply
    • Rich
      July 16, 2019 at 4:30 pm

      David, Noise being random, several images stacked in post processing will help reduce the total noise in the final image as the software can cancel it out.

      Reply
  6. Marc McCann
    July 18, 2019 at 8:04 am

    Great article on a feature that is not often discussed. Bulb mode on my Nikon D810 is invaluable for dawn landscape shots where exposures often run several minutes. It also comes in handy at other times of day when using a neutral density filter.

    Reply
  7. Frank Doyle
    August 1, 2019 at 2:22 pm

    The D3500 has done away with the IR sensor, so your suggestion of a wireless shutter release for “Nikon D3000, D5000, and D7000 series cameras.” is no longer universal.

    Reply
    • Spencer Cox
      August 2, 2019 at 6:29 pm

      Thank you, Frank – I just corrected that, as well as a couple other articles that said something similar.

      Reply

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