Weekly Photo Challenge No. 152 - Electric

From my walk on Saturday

Hi Tony,

Your photo reminds me of a lost opportunity - mine , not yours.

Back in January, while Mrs bailey and I were driving to Mt. Gambier (South Australia) we passed a wind farm similar to your photo.  I hadn't seen one in real life before and so I saw that as a photo opportunity.  I asked "she who must be obeyed" if we can stop so I can take a photo but she wasn't keen on the idea at the time . So not wanting to risk a mutiny in the car, I sadly drove on.

Since about only three quarters of the wind mills were actually rotating at the time, I would have liked, given the opportunity, to take a photo with a slow shutter speed in order to capture some movement in the rotating wind mills which would help tell the story of what was going on - some wind mills were rotating and some were not.


 

Tony, great finding -- a wind farm! I really like how you composed your shot. Our eyes naturally follow the wind turbines into the horizon.  Well done!

Pardon my ignorance, but how can you get a photograph to show that something is moving?

Hi whippet


A slow shutter speed introduces blurring in an image from anything that is moving, especially if it is moving quickly.  The opposite applies when you want to freeze action in a scene - you would use a fast shutter speed to "stop" the action.  How fast or slow a shutter speed you need depends on how fast the movement in the scene is.

You might have accidentally captured movement in a scene when for example you are photographing a stationary subject next to a shrub on very windy day.  The camera doesn't know it is windy or whether or not you want to freeze the swaying of the shrub in your image and so just meters according to the light in the scene.  In the resultant image the subject will be sharp but the shrub will be blurred slightly due to its swaying in the wind while the shutter is open.  To freeze the swaying of the shrub you would need to set a faster shutter speed than what the camera metered and compensate with a larger aperture (smaller F stop number) to maintain a constant exposure.

So from this example, hopefully you can see that to introduce motion into a photo you need to deliberately set a slower shutter speed and compensate with a smaller aperture {higher F stop).

To get the effect you want will usually involve some trial and error (adjusting the shutter speed) until you get the amount of blurring you want.  Slower shutter speed = more blurring, faster shutter speed = less or no blurring.  In some cases you might need a shutter speed in seconds (especially if the action in the scene is very slow moving) not fractions of a second.  But once you get shutter speeds slower than about 1/60s or 1/30s (even with image stabilisation in lenses) you will need a tripod or mount your camera on something sturdy (fence , post, wall etc) to avoid camera shake.

Another way of introducing motion in a photo is by panning.  That is when you track a moving subject through a scene (typically racing cars, airplane landing on tarmac etc) with a slow shutter speed but sufficient enough to keep the subject sharp and blur the background at the same time.  Panning takes a bit of practice to get good results because you are panning a hand held camera in most cases, but well worth it.

Whether you use manual or shutter priority mode when you want to introduce or freeze motion in a photo is largely personal preference.  If the light is constant, then I usually use manual mode to adjust the shutter speed.  I also make sure the ISO is set to the lowest setting available when I need slow shutter speeds.  To freeze action, I sometimes have to bump up the ISO if the max aperture (lowest F number) still can't give me the shutter speed I need at low ISO setting to freeze the action.


 

Hi whippet,

No problem and thank you for the clarification 

I realised after I submitted my second post that I had used wind mill (even my spelling was incorrect as you pointed out) instead of wind turbine.  I was too lazy to go back and edit my posts and thought heck, I'll just leave them as is and see if anyone picks me up on it.  Well done Detective Whippet

Oh and btw I am in Melbourne, Australia.

I love the irony