Someone told me I will have to let the bulb setting cool a bit after use or it will ruin my camera. I am wanting to try long exp. Does anyone know if this is true? Thanks for the help.
@miata2u I have not run into a problem, and I've used bulb setting for shots up to 2 or 3 minutes. I've not used it for really long shots of night sky where it would be on for 30 - 60 minutes. I have heard that the battery will drain so you won't be able to do many shots without changing the battery between. Thanks for asking about this as I'm curious about what others can share.
I have a D5100 and use the bulb more when doing star trails, but only in 30 sec shots with 7-10 sec in between. Other than draining the battery, I have never seen any difficulties with the camera.
interesting, i looked up some info on canon site about bulb setting and it only mentions not to point at the sun during bulb exposures as it will over heat the components
Long exposures lead to over-heating of the camera's sensor, and the appearance of 'hot pixels' in the photo. I only know this because I was idly reading my camera's manual and came across something called 'pixel mapping'. 'Hot pixels' are temporary and will recover when the sensor cools. This page may explain http://www.olympusamerica.com/crm/oneoffpages/ask_oly/crm_e_ask_oly_03_09.asp . I think the person talking to you may have been confused. Olympus cameras have a setting beyond bulb called 'Live Composite' that will do continuous multiple exposures upto max. 3 hours.
Maybe once upon a time in the old CCD sensor days, but I know of no problems with current cameras, your T3i for example. Unless of course you have a strong light source and leave the shutter open for a while. But any "sensible" exposure will give you no problems.
@laroque "Continuous multiple exposures" is the key Tim. The charge is taken off the sensor for each exposure. Any possible issue is if the charge builds up continuously without being read off and cleared, exactly what "bulb" does. But for "sensible" exposures, there is no issue.
Movie/video similarly. The charge is read off and reset after each frame, even though the sensor is continuously exposed to light.
@laroque@miata2u I will amend my state, per Tim L, as I have experienced "hot spots", tiny red dot on images that were exposed over a time frame of five minutes, easily post-processed, but nothing on the 30 second exposures.
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Movie/video similarly. The charge is read off and reset after each frame, even though the sensor is continuously exposed to light.