shutter speed technical exercise

For this exercise I decided I would photograph water as my moving thing. I initially thought of shooting water coming out of my garden tap against the house wall. I picked a time of day to get a nice shadow on the wall just for a bit of interest but quickly realised that the amount of actual water travelling through the frame was not enough to demonstrate the exercise differences very well.

So I moved inside to my kitchen sink to get closer to the water. I experimented with a few different compositions and framing of the tap and wall and water stream and was quite happy with the light coming into the frame. But again found not enough water to accentuate the changes in shutter speed.

So I then dragged a tall piece of furniture over to the sink where I could set my tripod up to look down into the sink and still have a stable surface to shoot from. It all got a bit complicated and hard to climb up and take the shots and check them before each take along with the realisation that the higher I got the less movement across the frame I was getting with the stream of water.

So I simplified and set the tripod up on the bench next to the sink and framed up this shot which I felt was the best so far. The simplicity of the composition highlights the shutter speed water differences really well.

0.4 SS

1/1600 SS

  

After this I played around with using a slow shutter speed and walking towards a subject. In my case moving up my dark hallway towards a window in the distance. I found that I had a better result if I noticed where the light in the frame was and tried to move evenly towards that rather than across the frame as the photo would show up the same block of light in all different places in the frame and cover over the other darker areas. I also practised moving the camera from left to right and up and down.