DSLRUsers.com

hi all, i just recently got a shutter release for my dslr and am keen to do long bulb exposures ( prob around 1hr+) and i had a friend tell me that you can 'burn' your sensor on long exposures? has anyone had problems like this? i used to do them on my film cameras and what to get back into shooting them so any advice would be greatly appreciated!

Well if you were taking long exposures of the sun, I could understand it, but I cant see you burning a sensor out anytime soon.

What you will find is that the sensor wll heat up, and introduce more noise to your photos. Your D300 is made to disipate the heat from the sensor, and inbuilt noise reduction is designed to detect and reduce any noise introducted.

ok that seems to make sense, i thought it did seem abit extreme that my sensor would self destruct on long exposures! but hey who knows with these new fangled electronical devices

i've never heard of sensor burn before, but i can see where the idea comes from. yeah, don't do any long exposure of the sun, and you should be pretty right.

on a side note, the in camera noise reduction feature will DOUBLE the length of your exposure time, so account for that but it generally works better than trying to reduce noise later on.

On my first D70s i had a terrible problem of getting a purple to red tinge that worked its way through from the corners the longer the exposure.
When i emailed Nikon about this they explained it as sensor burn and that the d70 was not high enough specd to work with longer exposures then 1min.
I had the problem from photos from 2min+.
By taking lots of lightning photos in the 2min exp area i also noticed the sensor starting to fade with its quality, so it might be something to also watch out for.
Anyway might not be relevant but i thought you might want to hear it.

Joshman wrote:i've never heard of sensor burn before, but i can see where the idea comes from. yeah, don't do any long exposure of the sun, and you should be pretty right.

on a side note, the in camera noise reduction feature will DOUBLE the length of your exposure time, so account for that but it generally works better than trying to reduce noise later on.

if you shoot in RAW, does the in camera NR feature do anything?

_robbo_ wrote:if you shoot in RAW, does the in camera NR feature do anything?

Yes it still works.

LIVE4EVA wrote: lightning photos in the 2min exp area i also noticed the sensor starting to fade with its quality,

That sounds like the sensor is not disipating the heat as efficiently as it should

_robbo_ wrote:

Joshman wrote:i've never heard of sensor burn before, but i can see where the idea comes from. yeah, don't do any long exposure of the sun, and you should be pretty right.

on a side note, the in camera noise reduction feature will DOUBLE the length of your exposure time, so account for that but it generally works better than trying to reduce noise later on.

if you shoot in RAW, does the in camera NR feature do anything?

to be honest.... i have no idea. it's been far too long since i've done any long exposure work (hopefully that'll change this weekend!)