Assignment 2

Shutter Speed

Photos taken 6/27/24

Reflection: I liked practicing the panning shots for this assignment. It definitely took some practice and I think the hardest part aside from the technical one was feeling slightly uncomfortable taking pictures of strangers going about their daily business. At least one of the subjects also did not want to be photographed/have their face showing, so that resulted in an interesting picture, and ironically one of my more successful (less blurry) ones. At the same time, I know that's what photojournalists and street photographers do on a daily basis, so they must get used to it over time.  

In terms of composition I prefer the pictures I took of bikers, because I was able to get the whole subject in the shot. With the cars, I was a little too close and usually only got the front or the back of the vehicle. For the first picture in that set, I think the freezing of motion effect is really cool --it feels like we've paused this moment in time but still get a sense of the traveler's speed.

With the spinning umbrella, it was neat to see the clear progression of blurry to clear as we made the shutter speed faster. The pattern of the umbrella made it easy to see this progression, and I almost like the ones with a little bit of blur, like in the second image, more than the perfectly clear ones. I wasn't expecting such a drastic change in light level as shutter speed increased, but of course it makes sense, because there is less time for light to hit the sensor. For the last shot at 1/500 s, I had to bump up the ISO to 3200 and the resulting image is still a little dark.