Fall Color Shimmy Shake
Canon 5D Mark II, 300mm F/4.0, f/32, .8 sec, iso 100
This image was from Saturday morning's local photo shoot. I mentioned two days ago that I wanted to capture the leaves moving on their own, but wasn't successful because I couldn't get a slow enough shutter.
But I did use another technique, that I have known about for quite some time, but have never really successfully used. I first learned about this in a book by Tony Sweet. What you do is use a slow shutter, then move the camera up and down. Sounds easy. It is easy. But coming up with an image worth displaying is another thing. There are probably some special composition rules for scenes that work well with this technique. Blog buddy John Barclay has done some great work with this technique, both up and down and sideways (see this gallery webpage). Maybe he will comment on this post with some recommendations for the best subjects or compositions. One more example, from blog buddy Ed Vatza.
As you can see by the specs I was fully stopped down (f/32, not 3 point 2 !), iso at it's lowest, and I still could not get over a second of exposure. So what I did was just hold the shutter down, while moving the camera (mostly) up and down over the scene. I fired off about 15 frames this way. Hopefully a couple of them would look nice.
In talking about this shoot with my friend Stephan, he pointed out that I could have put on a ND filter or two, and gotten a slower shutter. DANGIT! Seems like on every shoot there is at least one thing that I figure out later would have helped me. Thanks though Stephan!
But I digress. I selected this image out of the ones shot, mainly because I like the leaves on the lower right, it's obvious they are fall color leaves, the image hasn't gone too far into abstract. I believe I am also drawn to this one because the movement is not perfectly vertical, I like the variation. In Lightroom I just did some curves and vibrance. I actually desaturated the yellow a bit, it was so strong.
JB calls these "in camera effects" and I think that is a great way to think about them. Comments are always FREE on Wednesdays, here at the Dream Tomorrow blog, so have at it.
