Photo2Q2.6: Slow Shutter

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As a primarily people-photographer, I had pretty little experience in slow shutter photography. It's simply not my cup of tea. I like having freedom when I shoot. By that, I mean freedom of movement; I dislike having to be attached to a tripod, which is what, a majority of the succeeding photos in this post consist of. I tried to do what I could based on what I knew. Researching for this was a little bit more difficult since I interpreted a lot of what I saw on Pinterest and Google images as being too difficult to replicate because of how precisely I needed to have the conditions meet. That may be a lack of effort, or just being afraid of trying something new, but I digress.

Brainstorm slide

Brainstorming in class was helpful in bouncing ideas off of each other. I realized that one of my concepts was basically like leaving everything up to chance and having little personal artistic effort (10-30sec concept).

Concept 1 (1/60-.5sec):  1/2, f/10, and ISO 100

Concept 1 (1/60-.5sec) 1/40, f/10 and ISO 100

For this first concept, I just wanted to capture nature; nothing super thematic. I was hiking and unfortunately had no tripod to mount my camera on. Still, I attempted to shoot the stream as described in my brainstorm slide. There was no waterfall anywhere really, so I settled for these small drop-offs in the stream. The biggest difficulty here was just the sheer amount of camera shake. I was really trying not to drop my camera into the water, so I held onto it tight (which unfortunately caused the extra camera shake as shown). In the future, I'd bring something like a mini tripod or a gorilla pod.

Concept 2 (1-5sec) 3s, f/8, and ISO 100

Concept 2 (1-5sec) 2s, f/7.1, and ISO 400

For the second concept, I wanted to recreate Frank Ocean's Blonde album cover with a little twist of slow shutter to it. In retrospect, perhaps using a variety of angles and having actual sub-concept variations would've made this better. The difficult part of this was getting in and out of the shower and having to deal with freezing every time I splashed water on myself.  In addition, the bar itself in the shower was kinda frustrating to deal with, but I tried recreating the cover with my 50mm without slow shutter and it turned out fine. Perhaps asking someone to shoot for this one or trying another concept in general would've been preferable.

Concept 3 (10-30sec) 15sec, f/4, and ISO 100

Concept 3 (10-30sec) 15sec, f/4, and ISO

Perhaps my weakest concept because I deviated so much from my original brainstorm plans, I was at a party at the time and thought that the place they used was interesting, because they had a church with this unique upper part to it. Some editing got the yellowish hue it originally had due to surrounding lighting, but it persists. Having the moving clouds is indeed interesting, but if I were to reshoot this, I'd definitely use a variety of buildings instead of just one.

Below are some additional photos I gained from the shoot. Some are relevant to the project, some aren't.

In all honesty, none of the concepts were my favorite and I thought that I failed expectations for this project, but if I were to rate them on success level, concept 2, 1, 3. On a scale of 1 to 10 in terms of how confident I am in slow shutter, I think I'm a 4-5. Last time, in the light painting post, I mentioned how I thought that slow shutter was interesting, but as a project I'd do personally, it isn't. In that post I also mentioned that my confidence going in was a 6-7. My reduction in score was due to the apparent lacking in effort and quality in this project, and I realize that. Here's to next quarter/year; doing better in planning and becoming a more responsible student is a primary goal of mine.