Exploratory Analysis · 2026
Holding Still
How long a photograph takes, from the first surviving camera photograph in 1827 to phone night modes.
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About this project
The question
I usually leave my shutter open for about a tenth of a second, and I wanted to know how unusual that is. Holding Still compares my photographs with a random sample of everyday photographs and with documented exposure times from early photography.
Reading the chart
Exposure time runs along a logarithmic axis from 1/8000 of a second to 30 seconds. Each bright line is a shutter speed, and it burns brighter the more photographs share that speed. Gold is for dedicated cameras, blue is for phones and tablets, and circles mark my own photographs. "Slow" means 1/13 of a second or longer.
What I found
- Only 4% of the photographs I sampled are as slow as most of mine.
- Cameras follow the shutter dial: 93% of camera exposures land on a standard shutter step, compared with 33% for phones, which can choose any value in between.
- Slow photographs have become less common over time, and the earliest exposures in the documented record took hours.
Where the data comes from
The sample is a random draw of Wikimedia Commons files that have both a capture date and an exposure time in their metadata. I removed duplicates, implausible exposures, and film-scanner files. Because Commons holds bulk uploads from a few archives, I kept at most one photograph per author per day and at most 50 per author, and changing those limits moves the published figures by about a percentage point at most.
Phones and tablets are identified from the maker and model name. The exposures from 1827 to 2019 come from museums, archives, and camera makers, and the project's repository lists them with quotes and sources. Where sources disagree, I kept the full range.
What to keep in mind
- Commons is a sample of what people upload and does not represent all photography.
- Capture dates come from camera clocks, and some of those clocks were never set.
- A phone that merges several frames may record the exposure of one frame instead of the total.
- Film records no exposure metadata, so the years before digital cameras show documented exposures only.
The photographs in the piece are © Alex Corvin, and no Commons images are shown.