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Shutters and movement

Here are my shots for the exercise looking at how different shutter speeds give a sense of movement. I didn't quite do it according to the book, far too small a range in f stops (F4 to f22) on the 24-105 lens to cope with the shutter speed range of 30sec to 1/8000sec of the 5D MkII but a range from 1/13 to 1/400 nicely illustrates thing along with an illustration of smaller f number = smaller depth of field. Now for the photos, not the most exciting of compositions I know but the scientist in me wanted to illustrate the point of the exercise as much as possible. I set this up to give me several different movements. First is the nearest duck which was having a good old scratch, next the almost chaotic movement of the water over the rocks to the right of the ducks and finally the vertical movement of the background waterfall. For all the shots focus was on the closest duck

f22 1/13

In this slow shutter speed shot the water and the duck show movement blur looking effective for the water (particularly the waterfall which the narrow aperture leaves in focus).

f20 1/25

My favorite, the slightly subtler blurring of the water allows the green of the rocks to show through and there is enough blurring of the ducks head to suggest movement without looking to out of focus.

Moving through the series all give slightly different effects of motion blur which would vertainly have use in different aspects of photography. By 1/250sec motion in the scene is effectively frozen though depth of field effects are starting to put the background out of focus.

f14 1/50sec

f10 1/80sec

f9 1/124

f6.3 1/250

f4.5 1/400sec

Rule of thirds

I haven't started the composition part of the the course yet as I'm trying to come up with something a bit more interesting than passing traffic for the panning exercise. If pushed on what I know about the subject already I think I could only come up with the rule of thirds. Every week I some really great photography dropping into my in-box thanks to the Magnum picture of the week service.
Last week it was this photo by Chien-Chi, http://www.magnumphotos.com/C.aspx?VP3=ViewBox_VPage&IID=2K7O3RJ2VSX9&CT=Image&IT=ZoomImage01_VForm
If ever a picture displayed the rule this one has it by the bucket load! Vertically the couples eyes are about on the 1/3 up line and the tops of their heads 1/3 down, each of their noses are about 1/3 in from the edge, that and the looks in the eyes of the couple all add up to a very engaging picture.

Lightroom plugin now registered!

And one more post of the same photo now the size restriction is gone!


















This shot was taken a couple of years ago on a lovely spring day in the main square of Wroclaw, Poland. Everyone was so focused on the huge bubbles being blown I could happily wander around with the dSLR (EOS 20D with a Sigma 18-55mm  for this day) snapping away candid shots that would normally have been noticed by everyone in the frame!

Lightroom plugin

This is just a quick test of uploading images direct from Lightroom using a rather useful little plugin from http://photographers-toolbox.com . Once I've made sure this works its back to doing battle with printer profiling to try and make what comes out on paper match what I see on my nicely calibrated screen.














As it seems to working I think its time to make a donation to remove the 300 pixel longest side limit on the free version.

Monitor Calibration

I've been happily using my Macbook Pro on its standard monitor calibration settings. The course material said it was important to properly calibrate the screen. So tonight's bit of digging around in the innards of OSX was to find how to do the calibration (nice and easy, system preferences, displays, colour, calibrate, then tick the advanced box as the not advanced just seems to make things worse!). Follow the instructions on screen and WOW what a difference! I really hadn't realised all those white screens I'd been looking at were actually a dirty grey colour until I started flipping back and forth between my nice new calibrated profile and the standard one and looking at various photos the improvement is equally obvious. Next job sorting out the printer colour matching I think as the shots I've printed for my files so far look a little dark.

I've just noticed something!

I've just noticed every one of the photos I've taken for the course so far (including the couple of dozen I've shot today but not posted yet for the first part of the movement exercise) have been portrait oriented. It must have been the mood I was in over the last few days as quick scan though a few thousand of my photos in Lightroom seems to show slightly more landscape than portrait photos. But that said of the 16 photos, prints and paintings on the wall in here 2 are square, 4 landscape and the other 10 portrait so maybe I do subconsciously prefer one orientation over the other. It'll be interesting to explore that as the course progresses.