ND Filter Long Exposure Charts – Free Download

When working with neutral density filters to create very long daytime exposures, or when photographing at night, it’s likely that your shutter speed is going to need to exceed the 30 seconds that most cameras allow you to set directly.  In order to maintain the correct exposure, your camera must be set to Bulb Mode, and the shutter must be held open for the correct amount of time using either a shutter release cable, or another device like an iPhone with a Trigger Trap attached to it.

Why Should You Carry a Physical Copy of the Charts?

Whilst there are a great many excellent mobile apps that will calculate the correct exposure for you, it’s not always practical to rely on an electronic device for this kind of information. It’s easy to accidentally run out of battery power, or you might be photographing in cold weather conditions that cause your device to shut down. For this reason, I always recommend that you carry around a physical copy of a long exposure chart so that you can find the correct exposure every time.

In order to make it easy for you, because I’m a nice guy like that, I’ve created a perfectly formatted set of exposure charts for you to download and print to keep in your camera bag and on your mobile device.

Free Printable Exposure Chart PDF

The PDF version is formatted for easy printing, and contains values for all neutral density filters from 1-stop to 16-stops.

Long Exposure Charts for Neutral Density Filters

For quick web reference, you’ll find a series of neutral density exposure charts below.  If you are particularly interested in the math of how I arrived at these exposure times, you should check out my other article : How To Calculate Long Exposure Times.

There are 3-tables below:

• 1-5 stops
• 6-10 stops
• 10-16 stops

If you require data on exposure times for neutral density values greater than 16-stops, I suggest you take a look at my other post containing the formula for calculating log exposure times.

How to Use These Charts

Set up your camera in the required composition and adjust the exposure until it is correct without the ND filter in place. Note the shutter speed, and then find this shutter speed in the left-hand column of the table below that corresponds to the ND filter you want to use.  Read the new shutter speed from the column that corresponds to your filter, and then input this number into the device that you are going to use to control your camera in bulb mode.  Or, if you are simply using a shutter release cable, press the shutter button down and begin some sort of timer until you reach the required exposure duration.

Resultant exposure times that fall below 30 seconds (inclusive) were rounded to the nearest commonly used shutter speed that is used in modern cameras.  For these values, bulb mode might not be necessary and you can simply select this shutter speed in manual exposure mode on your camera.  For all exposure times longer than 30 seconds, I’ve left things in hours/minutes/seconds for completeness, although with very long exposure times, you will be able to round to the nearest minute with no problem since the exposure is likely to be more effected by changing ambient light throughout the exposure duration anyway.

1-stop ND to 5-stop ND

6-stop ND to 10-stop ND

11-stop ND to 16-stop ND