Creative Effects
While out and about today, I had my camera with me as usual. I spotted something that I thought had a fir bit of potential to make some interesting photos from.
I was at the local shopping mall, sitting down on a bench in the middle with people walking past me. I decided to use a wide-angle and a slow shiutter speed to try and capture the people walking past - well blurring past.
As I was shooting at a fairly slow speed and didn't want to be noticed by the people walking past, I simply supported my Camera on the seat I was sitting on, waited until there were people walking past and pressed the shutter.
It took a few shots to get the feel of where I should "point" the camera, and a few more to work out, for the best effect that I needed a shutter speed of between 1/3sec and 1/10sec.
As the lighting was constant, I simply adjusted the aperture until I got close to the desired speed. I ended up shooting between f5.6 and f8.
I was fortunately sitting in an area where a lot of people were walking past from both directions and were not paying me any attention at all. The bonuse was there was plenty of form and colour in the shopfronts which make up the background of my scene.
Taking this sort of photo's is a bit of a guess and can be very hit and miss. Over a period of about 20 minutes I took around 30 photos and I have put 7 into a gallery.
After looking at the images on the Computer I noted that most of the images were shot at around 1/4 second - and has provided an interesting blur of people thru the scene. At these speeds, the people are not recognisable at all - and except for the fact that their feet are clearly visible you might not even recognise them as people.
The distance between where I was sitting and the wall was around 4 Metres and people were between 1 and 3 Metres from where I was sitting.
Inspiration for trying this was from an in-depth article I read in a magazine a few months ago. The article was about motion blur and even though it was using moving cars as the subject, the principals are the same - a steady support and slow shutter speeds.
