By the way, do you know about Open House? It’s on in two weeks. I’ll be doing a tour of the Aviva and hopefully Leinster House and maybe a trip up Liberty Hall. It might be too late to organise a meet up for that but it’s worth visiting a few of the buildings if you are around.

Can this be achieved with a hand-held digital camera? Well not exactly as I did, but odds are your camera will have some features you could use to try and replecate the situation. Many hand held digital cameras come with a little tripod mounting screw at the bottom so you could buy a cheap tripod and use that. If you dont want to buy a tripod then a bean bag that you can shape to hold the camera in position on a wall or fence post would do, even just standing the camera on a wall should steady it.

For the cable release, if your camera has manual settings you might be able to set the shutter exposure time to 30 seconds or higher. Use your cameras self timer press the button, but the camera on its spot take your hands off and wait for the camera to take the photo.

Next the ND is a little bit trickier since odds are your camera will not have a filter screw on the front of the lens. But you could look around for a piece of dark glass you might be able to use that. I know some people make filters using welding glass but that might make your exposure several minutes instead of 30 seconds. Then find some way of attaching it flush to your lens, you dont want light leaking in at one side. If it has a retractable lens this might be a little difficult if you tape the glass into position and the camera tries to retract the lens you could damage your camera so be careful!

Then the exposure is a matter of trial and error, set the time to 10 seconds, take a shot, if it’s too dark then increase the time, if too bright reduce the time. The photos I took had times of 40 seconds and that removed the people walking around, when they walked quickly enough. If the time is too short to remove the people without the photo being too bright try adjusting your ISO to it’s lowest value (80 or 100) and set the aperture (if you can) to a high value (say f20) that should reduce the light going into the camera anyway and add some time onto the shot.

Even if you dont get great long exposures you should be able to achieve some interesting results and prehaps you could play around with movement trails of lights or people. Have fun.