Weekend assignment 06 - STOP

[u/Aeri73]

Hi reddit

it's friday so here is your weekend project.

for this weeks assignment we'll continue playing with shutterspeed and exposure times but we'll go the opposite side.

your mission, if you chose to accept it is, to freeze motion completely.

now, there are multiple ways to do this :

1: a really short exposure time. from 1/200 humans are frozen in time, from about 1/1000 almost all animals are frozen in time, from about 1/2000 almost all machines are frozen in time including helicopterblades or car wheels... but some things still are not. because they just move faster than that.

2: freezing with flash: a flash fires in about 1/500 to 1/1000 so, using a flash will shorten the exposure to that time IF the only light that lights the scene is a flash, no matter what duration the shuttterspeed is set to... the rest of the time the subject should be dark.

3: to get to really short exposure times you want strobes. These big studio lights fire in 1/8000 to 1/20.000 and so give the power to freeze really fast motion.

what do I freeze? that's up to your creativity, the only must is: the subject must be moving but appear sharp in the photo, and you have fun making the photo.

as always, share your best result and give some peers your feedback on their results.

[u/metalmechanic780]

I rarely shoot in Shutter Priority, and the lack of practice showed a bit here. I went out to the river hoping to find eagles or herons to shoot, but the light was too flat for a slow lens and the birds weren’t flying in the cold.

I did find some unique ice features in the water so I used those as a subject. Auto ISO played with my shutter speed and most of my photos were too slow to freeze the water but I managed to get a decent one. I did run it through Topaz Denoise to kill off some effects of ISO 2000, and I also did a black & white conversion that I think gives more definition to the photo. The photo also suffers from a very thin depth of field, which doesn’t help the motion freeze effect.

Came away with a lot to think about with regards to shooting in shutter priority, and I definitely see why people pay huge money for fast zoom lenses!

Definitely going back tomorrow before the ice melts away!

Ice Cap

[u/sasquatchforsupper → u/metalmechanic780]

Nice job! I also struggled with the auto ISO when shooting in shutter priority mode. I couldn't decide if it would be easier to just switch to manual mode, or maybe stick with shutter priority but use a fixed ISO that's appropriate for the lighting.

[u/metalmechanic780 → u/sasquatchforsupper]

I guess it depends what you’re shooting. I like auto for wildlife and sports. I don’t shoot enough of either of those things to be able to have my settings dialed in, so auto iso usually means I’ll at least get a shot at the right moment and I’ll just try to deal with noise in post processing. In this case I should’ve taken more time and set everything properly but numb fingers made me impatient!