Last year while shooting winter photos in Yosemite National Park, Nick Didlick (a friend and Blue Pixel Associate) came up with a unique (and low-cost) way of shooting time exposures. I was reminded of that recently when I needed to do the same thing, and didn't have a cable release.

I was leading a photo trek in the southwest for Pack Paddle Ski (www.packpaddleski.com) and a few of us had decided to do time exposures at night. To do that, you normally set the camera to "Bulb" and use a cable release to lock the shutter open for the time you want. Some of us had releases like that for our cameras, but one person didn't, and I lacked one for the new Nikon D80 as well. During high school I worked for a photographer who was fond of saying, "why don't you out-smart it" any time I got stumped by something in photography. And that's just what Nick did last winter in Yosemite.

We were doing time exposures, and Nick had forgotten to bring along his cable release. Finding just the right-sized pebble, he set the camera for "Bulb," laid the pebble on top of the shutter release, then wrapped the camera strap over the pebble tight enough to press it down and hold the shutter open.

On this recent trip, we took that one step further. Finding it difficult to get the right amount of pressure using the camera strap, we dug out a roll of tape from a first-aid kit and used it to tape the pebble in place. Voila! It worked like a charm, and we spent over an hour shooting time exposures up to five-minutes in length.

Just goes to show that the old adage is still true, "where there's a will there's a way." It's great to find simple solutions to what might be considered high-tech problems.