Exercise 3.1
Using fast shutter speeds, try to isolate a frozen moment of time in a moving subject.  Depending on the available light you may have to select a high ISO to avoid visible blur in the photograph. Try to find the beauty in a fragment of  time that fascinated John Szarkowski. Add a selection of shots, together with relevant shooting data and a description of your process (how you captured the images), to your learning log.

Well what better to do on New’ Year’s Day than go and try to stop time 🙂 !

Our idea was to go and watch some silly nutters running into the sea in the morning, but when we got there the beach was bare!!  Presumably the rain, wind and rough high tide combined to discourage anyone.  Either that or it was cancelled .

Anyway, we finally found ourselves on the beach at Littlehampton where the combination of rolling waves, shoreline birds and mad people running, gave me the opportunity to capture some motion and stop the action.

As instructed I set the camera onto shutter priority, and because it was wet and raining, but still relatively bright, I put the ISO on 640, so that I could keep the speed as high as possible.  I was also using a Tamron 70-200 2.8 lens, which is fairly heavy especially in conjunction with the camera so wanted to ensure I could combat any camera shake as well. 

I am pleased with the outcome of this exercise.  Using shutter priority did make things easier, as I wasn’t worrying about the settings once set up, which meant I could concentrate on watching the scene for movement. 

For most of the shots I tried to stand as still as possible, but with some of the bird shots, I did try panning along with the flight and as I was able to keep the shutter speed up, that was quite successful.

I think that in order to stop motion, you also need to actually see that movement is happening, i.e. if you took a photo of a car, stopping all motion, then it could just be parked!, where as a person running or a bird in flight is still moving in the image even though the motion is stopped.  That’s why I chose to take photos of things that look different when they’re are moving to how they look when they are still.

I agree with Flusser’s view that ‘framing a photograph is not just space, but also time. The human eye certainly doesn’t see all of the different movement of a birds wings, by just watching.

Contact Sheets for this shoot can be seen here: contact sheets

Water Drops

Also tried to emulate Harold Edgerton’s mild drop coronet, 1957 by having a go a milk drops in water.  It took thousands of shots to get a few good ones, but was really enjoyable and a little bit addictive.  In this instance shutter speed is coupled with flash lighting and coloured gels to stop the action.

Technical Notes:

• 35 mm camera with 105 mm macro lens
• f/14 & f/20 with ISO100, 105 mm, 1/200 (to sync with flashes)
• 2 flash guns with various coloured gels, fired with triggers, set at between 1/8 & 1/4
• remote shutter

for water:

• tray of water with black plastic on bottom to give reflections
• black back ground
• used clear water with xanthium gum added (makes it thicker)
• and a mixture of skimmed milk and cream

set up for water drop images

contacts for this shoot can be seen here