Exercise 4 Shutter Speeds

Even though these images have helped me understand more about the camera and settings I am not quite there on the exercise with them.  I don't want to just do vehicles on the road so I am still exploring other subjects to complete the exercise to it's requisite.  In the meantime I have attached these.  



f25 1/4sec

f22 1/3sec



f7.1 1/30sec



f14 1/15sec

 

I knew I would return to this another day.  It has been playing on my mind since I first started the exercise.  I never wanted to use the conventional water or vehicles and have tried lots of other subjects, none of which have been very successful.  

So here I am back to where I started with water.  It was a beautiful day today in Worcestershire.  So I walked down to the  Whirly hole as it is affectionately know locally and took some shots after wadding into the water.

The first shot shown below is the one I took with the slowest shutter speed.  I am not a true fan of the silky effect as I feel it looks unreal and therefore not a true reflection of what the eye can see.  

However the effect seems popular and when you look at it on a large scale it is very impressive.  For the purpose of this exercise I prefer the drama of the true picture as shown below.

f45 1sec

The next three images show the build up to my preference towards the whole raw drama of the movement of water as opposed to what may look pleasing.  As the shuuter speed becomes faster the water movement is shown more staggered and unfrozen and the images begin to look more like running water. 

f36 1/3

f20 1/8

f13 1/20

Leading to the final picture which is the one I personally like and the one for me that gives the drama and the movement that exists in flowing and moving water.

f5.6 1/400
On the above I used Adobe Photoshop to lighten the image very slightly as I simply had the wrong aperture setting for the shutter speed.

To me the above and final image shows real time movement and ferocity of the water.  The first image shows the water as a smooth and slow liquid that has almost a dreamy effect.

Conclusion

This exercise was fantastic for focusing me on the controls on my camera and truly getting to grips with the manual mode.  I had not really understood the meaning of the relation between shutter speed  and aperture and in all honesty had not been using the manual setting to it's capacity. 

My focus on the exercise was shutter speed as the item was a moving one.  So I spent my time ensuring I had the appropriate aperture for the lighting that was available to me.  The time taken was much less than I would normally take and more about technique than trial and error.  An excellent learning experience for me.

23 November 2010

I will return to this in later dates and add information from my manual learning log.