Hello, .
I’m convinced Ferris Beuller was a photographer.
And if not in practice, then definitely at heart.
It’s this quote that has me convinced; “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” – Ferris Bueller”
If that’s not a photographer’s attitude, I don’t know what is.
We, photographers, stop and look around a
lot.
And we usually make pictures of what we’re looking at.
Life does move pretty fast, but some life moves faster than other Life.
And when we stop and look around and decide to make a picture of what we’re
looking at, do we consider how fast it’s moving?
And when we consider how fast that Life we’re seeing moves, do we imagine what shutter speed we’d use to record the movement the way we want it in our photograph?
If we do this, we’re visualizing our composition based on the characteristics of the light we see, in this case, the characteristic of movement.
When photographing something moving, we can record the motion as blurred or not blurred.
The
word I use for the phrase “not blurred” is “static.
When it comes to the element of movement in our picture, we get to decide how much blur we want.
We’ve got the choices of more blurr, less blurr, or no blurr (static).
And our go-to setting for this is shutter speed.
We can’t go to the setting we need if we work in fully automatic exposure mode.
We can pick our shutter speed by working in the shutter priority or manual exposure modes.
When we pick our shutter speed, we should choose the one that gets us the results we want based on the speed of the movement in our photograph.
Think about photographing a street scene containing a pedestrian,
bicyclist, and car moving at their usual speeds.
The pedestrian would be the slowest, with the car being the fastest.
When using a shutter speed fast enough to record the car’s motion as static, all three appear in our photograph as static.
When using a shutter speed slow enough to record the pedestrian’s motion as blurred, all three would appear in our photograph, but the amount of blur recorded by each would vary.
The trick is, what
if we only wanted the car and bicyclist to appear as blurred in our picture? That’s doable as long as we don’t go too slow.
What if we wanted only the car and bicyclist to appear as static? That’s not doable.
Let’s want the pedestrian and bicyclist to appear as static. We can do that.
I can go on like this for a while, but you get where I’m going with this.
When visualizing our pictures, we’ve got to consider the characteristics of the light
we’re seeing and camera operation to get the compositions we imagine.
Of course, that means understanding the relationship between camera operation, light, and our intended composition.
That’s what I teach in my group classes and private lessons.
Although I teach that in all the ways I offer photography instruction, the Introduction to Photography class, or the private lessons version, is the most effective and quickest way to learn it.
The Introduction to Photography classes scheduled for March are now open for registration. Other scheduled group classes are below.
