3 Ways to take long exposure Photos on iPhone

iPhone Photography
Written By Chris Feichtner

There are several ways to take a long exposure photo on iPhone. In this blog post, I'll show you the three ways of long exposure photography I use myself with my iPhone for my travel photos. I'll also highlight the differences between these three ways and when to use which one.

Table of Contents

Apps for taking long exposure photos on iPhone

You may wonder why you need a dedicated camera app to capture long exposure photos on iPhone. It's because the hardware shutter speed of the iPhone is limited to 1 second. That is definitely too short for long-exposure photography.

So innovative developers came up with ideas to simulate a slow shutter on iPhone by essentially capturing multiple frames during a long exposure and to combine them into a single frame. One of the first apps that enabled long exposures on iPhone was Slow Shutter Cam App, which I've been using for years.

Before I talk about the apps I use, let's have a look at a few sample long exposure photos I've taken with different apps and different iPhone models

40 second long exposure taken with Slow Shutter Cam App

Flowing water captured with Reeheld Camera App

Long exposure of a train entering a tunnel converted from a Live Photo

Now, let's have a look at the camera apps, and the first is Slow Shutter Cam App

Slow Shutter Cam App is the most versatile camera app for long exposure photography

My favorite camera app for taking long exposure photos with iPhone is Slow Shutter Cam App. I discovered it back in 2012 and I've been using for my long exposure photography on iPhone since then.

Slow Shutter Camera App offers three shooting modes:

  • Motion Blur: This mode allows you to create the well known milky effect of flowing water or to blur moving objects like trains or cars.
  • Light Trails: A mode for capturing light trails of e.g. passing cars at night
  • By using the night photography mode, you can capture well lit and low noise photos at night.

You can learn more about the different shooting modes and about Slow Shutter Camera in my extensive Slow Shutter Cam App review.

To demonstrate the capabilities of Slow Shutter Camera App, here's a 40-second long exposure photo of the London Eye. I captured this long exposure of the ferris wheel using an iPhone 6S.