Stills of Summer 5

he was very happy when he got to the beach

My family LOVE the water. I love the joy captured in E’s jump. The blurriness in this instance was actually intentional. I think it works. What do you think?

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Homework Part 2: Shutter speed and motion

Waahoo!

I found an hour today to go out and try to complete the second part of my homework. I had to take a photo of something moving with a fast shutter speed and a slower shutter speed to see what effect it has on the feeling of movement in a photo.

Fast shutter speed = clear, no feeling of motion.

Slower shutter speed = blurred object, motion evident

For anyone who read my previous post on this week’s homework you may remember that I was a bit perplexed about how to get a steady shot of a fast moving object hand panning. After reading advice left from excellent photographers and fellow bloggers Mel Mann and Edith Levy (thank you both so much for leaving your comments, I found them invaluable and I think they really helped me get something useable) I grabbed my camera bag and drove to an area in Tea Tree Gully that I thought had plenty of traffic and some interesting things to photograph if I had trouble and needed cheering up!

I found it difficult, although not impossible, to get the panning speed right and ended up with about 4 shots that I was happy enough to use, so I HAD TO PICK ONE! I didn’t think THAT would be an issue, haha.

I also found that panning a car going directly past me was easier than trying to get them coming toward me at an angle. That may be obvious? But I had no idea. Still don’t really.

The other thing I actually found really frustrating was that I wanted to slow my shutter speed down below 1/3 to get a long trail for the stationary background, but I couldn’t get my camera meter to a correct light exposure with the shutter so slow. Anyway, I had to settle for a couple of pretty average shots. As you can see in the absence of the ability to make the moving object particularly interesting I tried to at least make the scene slightly interesting. Again, any suggestions of  how to improve my settings would be appreciated because it is now obsessively occupying my mind.

A special mention to the man sitting on the pub verandah looking perplexed as I lay down on the footpath of a main road to try to get some stability by using my elbows as a makeshift tripod. He really did look like he thought I had lost my mind. He obviously doesn’t understand that my mind has been lost…to photography.

I will improve.

Homework Lesson 1, Part 1 – aperture

Homework for lesson 1 is two fold. The first part is to take the same(ish) photo with the lowest f-stop value available and then again with a high value. It is supposed to contrast the difference in the area that is in focus. Taking a photo of a fence was suggested. I was out photographing Boo ghost and decided to use the cedar berries all over my yard. Pretty basic.

Lower f-stop value = more blur

Higher f-stop value = less blur

The second part of the homework seems more challenging to me. We are to take another set of two contrasting shots using the shutter speed as the variation. The teacher suggested we try to get a background blur with a focused subject by panning the camera with the subject. The idea is to capture the ‘motion’. I don’t have any equipment other than the camera and I am assuming that panning at the correct rate without getting blur from my hand shaking is going to be hard (near impossible??) so I am putting it off. Any suggestions to help would be GREATLY APPRECIATED!!