Sunday, May 16, 2010

Experiments in Shutterspeed.


We spent yesterday afternoon and evening at the Shuttleworth Collection, photographing birds of prey in the afternoon and then switching to veteran airplanes in the evening. I experimented with different shutterspeeds for the photographs and it has reinforced my puzzlement as to why we have such rigid and different conventions for the two subjects.
With birds in flight, it is generally thought that the shutterspeed should be such that all motion is stopped and everything is sharp. Hence in the first Kite picture, 1/1000sec is too slow for the wing tip motion. The second kite image at 1/1600 is sharp throughout as is the Saker Falcon at 1/1250.

With airplanes (and cars etc), the opposite holds in that there should be some motion in the propeller (or wheels). Hence the image taken at 1/1000sec although very sharp isnot acceptable as the prop motion has been frozen. I tried at both 1/250 and 1/400 but found that, as I was using my camera on a tripod, I didn't manage to follow through sufficiently well with the panning so ended up images that were not sharp. My best images were a compromise at 1/800 sec

3 comments:

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Tramsteer said...

Prop driven aircraft are a nightmare, if you want to avoid stopped propellors which make them look like they will fall out of the sky.
Method 1 photo from the side then you use any speed you like but the background may not blur.
2> Drop the shutter speed to 100th or less and pan pan pan. Now you will blurred backgrounds and blurred props. Head on shots become a problem so with these I go to 150th to 200th.

Tramsteer said...

Prop driven aircraft are a nightmare, if you want to avoid stopped propellors which make them look like they will fall out of the sky.
Method 1 photo from the side then you use any speed you like but the background may not blur.
2> Drop the shutter speed to 100th or less and pan pan pan. Now you will blurred backgrounds and blurred props. Head on shots become a problem so with these I go to 150th to 200th.