Time for a little change of pace. I like to photograph water in motion, usually lengthening the exposure to get a “streaming” effect in waterfalls, waves on the beach or other forms of moving water. During the course of our travels, I’ve had some interesting opportunities, but I’ve not been in a position to slow the shutter speed. I’ve either been trying to keep up with a tour group or in a position where it wasn’t feasible to set up a tripod, essential for long exposures.
So, rather than work on long exposures, I’ve played around with very short exposures, requiring very fast shutter speeds. The idea here, of course is to “freeze” the action and capture individual droplets in motion. To do so, I have three variables I can vary to get the desired effect: the shutter speed, the aperture size and the sensor sensitivity (ISO).
If you look at this first photo taken out the window of a fast moving boat, I put the camera in shutter priority mode to set the shutter speed at 1/500th sec., fast enough to “freeze” water droplets sprayed by the boat cutting through the waves. Because it was very bright, I had set the sensor sensitivity at a relatively low ISO of 100, and the camera selected an aperture of f6.3 to allow the proper exposure. Here is the result.
It was relatively easy to achieve the “freezing” of the water droplets in mid-air. I was trying to capture the spray of water as well as the beautiful clouds and blue sky in the background. In some cases, my timing was such as to obscure everything with a wall of water; in other cases, I got only a modest bit of spray. This particular shot best achieved what I was trying to accomplish.
I applied a similar approach to a number of fountains that I’ve seen as we toured South American cities. These shots were easier in that I wasn’t trying to match the water movement with the background, in a moving boat! Following are two examples.
I manipulated the same three variables in this photo, but in a different way. I first put the camera in aperture priority mode and set the aperture to f3.2. My purpose was to limit the depth of field, blurring the background to accentuate the fountain and the falling water. Unlike the previous photo, I wasn’t interested in the background. I put the sensor sensitivity in automatic mode and the camera did the rest, choosing an ISO setting of 1250 and a shutter speed of 1/3200 sec. Very fast, as you can see.
This last photo was taken indoors in very subdued light. I started with a very high sensitivity setting, ISO 12,800. With the camera in aperture priority mode, I experimented a little with the aperture size before finding a result that I liked, at f5.6. That resulted in a shutter speed (1/160 sec) slower than in the previous photos but I liked the effect it produced. You can see that the droplets are a little blurred, showing just how far they can move in a short span of time.
That’s enough water and technique for awhile. In the next post, I’ll resume the photos of our travels in South America.