assignment 3. shutter speed
The purpose of this assignment is to provide a visual understanding of how to use shutter speed to either blur or freeze action.
set 1: blurring and freezing movement
1/15s f22 ISO 200
1/30 f16 ISO 200
1/60 f11 ISO 200
1/125s f8.0 ISO 200
1/250s f6.3 ISO 200
1/500s f4.5 ISO 200
set 2: panning
1/15s f14 ISO 200
1/30s f10 ISO 100
reflection
It was interesting to use water for the first part of this assignment, as there might be times that you would want to blur water and times that you’d want to freeze it. For the waterfall images, I thin the first two give a sense of ongoing movement that captures the feeling of the moving water best, but for a more dynamic fountain (as in the outtake images below). or for crashing waves, freezing the motion of water can produce very interesting images.
For the panning part of the assignment I chose the cyclist because it is the most technically proficient in terms of focusing and framing, but aesthetically I like the the carousel images more. It was challenging to get focus, framing, shutter speed, and panning all to come together at once, but since it felt like there was a bit of chance involved it was fun to practice. The carousel was slower than the cyclist, but I was closer to the carousel so that made panning challenging. The rabbit image has a good sense of speed, but I hadn’t had enough practice at that point to realize that I needed to pay attention not only to following the object with my camera, but also to the framing when I clicked the shutter. I had to use 1/15s to get a sense of speed with the carousel, and that adds a bit of camera shake to the rabbit image. Even though the rabbits appear a bit blurry I still like the image overall.
In the panning outtakes, the squirrel and the image with two children are framed well, but at 1/30s they don’t give much feeling of movement. The fox are taken at 1/15s and have a much better sense of movement, but they are not framed as well. The focal point is best with the squirrel, as his head is in focus. The owl is most in focus in the middle shot, and the fox’s haunch is most in focus in the third, so the focal point is a little off on both of those.
I included some photos from the Ring Fountain at the Greenway in the outtakes. I had originally planned to use the Ring Fountain for the first part of the assignment, but it didn’t work for multiple reasons: there was too much clutter in the background; it is a sporadic fountain so timing was hard to judge; and because the height and placement of water changed, it didn’t provide a set of images that made comparison of shutter speed evident. Faster shutter speeds did capture some interesting water forms, though.
