Now that DSLRs are in the hands of more and more 1st-time camera owners, I’ve noticed this question come up a lot.
“I’ve tried to photograph my son’s basketball games, but all my pictures are blurry. How do I get better pictures with my Canon EOS Digital Rebel?”
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In the all-important basic lesson about studying motion and shutter speeds, we met at a Milestone Mx—a dirt bike riding track.
Stopping action is simply using a fast shutter speed, timing when to release the shutter and picking a peak action moment.
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Panning is a little trickier.
But Milestone Mx is excellent not just because the dirt bike riders love the attention, but there are varying levels of skills.
The more skillful ones will actually "hotdog it" or show off for folks with cameras
The riders just go around and around the track in the same direction pretty much predictably along the same path.
That means my lots of chances great for practicing.
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Our 2nd attempt to see who would toss their cookies first, worked out better because the photo gods smiled on us.
For our purposes we didn’t want so much light.
With the sun out, even at our lowest ISO setting, the lowest shutter speed we could shoot at was 1/30 sec @ f22.
(I know, I know I could have used a neutral density filter to give me the shutter speed I need. But I didn’t have enough to go around for my students)
The shutter speed itself isn’t the problem.
We were finding that to get a good blur, we had to really, really spin our subject fast. Needless to say, not everyone is cut out to be an astronaut.
On our 2nd attempt, I felt we needed to minimize the vertical movement of the camera.
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So some of us used a superclamp and others used a tripod for vertical stability.
Continue reading More spinning to create illusion of speed
Spinning–Normally, this picture taken at 1/30 sec at f16 would have a whole lot depth-of-field especially since it was shot with a 17mm lens. The idea was to just have my subject Melissa sharp and the background blurred due to the motion of spinning her. For better results? I would use some sort of clamp to immobilize my camera in the vertical axis.
Imagination is something I lack.
Once in a while though, I surprise myself.
Most folks learn better if they actively do instead of sit passively and listen to their instructor go on and on in a darkened room.
Snore. I am more sensitive to this because among my favorite job descriptions is this one :
A professor is one who talks in someone else’s sleep
Every semester that I teach this Introduction to Digital Photography class, I am finding more and more ways to make my students use their cameras in class.
I’m having them use their cameras not because the beauty surrounding my classroom location is so inspiring but mostly it’s to teach them hands-on some concepts.
You can see for yourself the beauty I’m immersed in when you look at the pictures. Continue reading Spinning to create illusion of speed