Febreeze, escalator rides, and being a creeper

Some more shots from today! I've been running into a bit of a brick wall when it comes to capturing motion around me. I've walked up and down campus dozens of times, and I can only think about shooting cars (boring!). So I decided to get a little creative in my room today. Using the lighting from my window, a black sweater, and a Febreeze bottle, I actually ended up capturing some of the coolest pictures! This photo is shot at 1/500 shutter speed. This one is shot at 0.4 seconds to capture the blurring effect. As you can see, it's much "softer," and takes away from the dynamic element from the first photo.

Finally, I decided to play with the escalators in Huntsman and acted like a total creep taking pictures of strangers. That's one of the weirdest parts about photography - everything feels so awkward! As if holding a pretty large camera and a tripod walking around isn't noticeable enough, imagine me with said camera attached to a fully extended tripod "coincidentally" getting on the escalator any time someone else does. Then they start hearing the shutter noises.... There were a few people sitting right next to the escalators and after the 20th ride up and down, I wanted to apologize and explain I was doing it for a project. THANKFULLY I finally ran into Alice, one of my sorority sisters, who graciously took a quick break to help me out.

"Hey Alice!.........Do you think you can ride this escalator with me? And don't move. Like at all."

I loved the way this photo came out even though it was a little experiment! I shot it at 3 seconds (Fun Fact: Huntsman escalator rides are about 10 seconds long. That's how many times I rode them...) It definitely opened up my mind to new things I can try out. It would be really cool to experiment more on the escalator AND making the subject do multiple poses. I'm wondering if I were to do a 6 second shot with 3 seconds of the subject leaning against the left railing and 3 seconds leaning against the right railing. Then, ideally, I would capture 2 "images" of the subject and get the blurred surroundings. Trippy! All my photos look like a drug trip hahah.

Huge thank you to Alice. You guys might be seeing more of her, too - she said she'd be willing to help me out on future projects! What a gal!

Motion: Capturing and Blurring

Another thing we've been learning about in Digital Photography is capturing motion and blurring motion. In order to capture motion, your shutter speed must be very quick (to capture the motion instantly). This is usually pretty easy to grasp. I personally find blurring motion to be much more interesting. With blurring motion, you set your shutter speed to higher/slower. So instead of a quick shutter speed of 1/120, you can do a shutter speed of 2 seconds, 5 seconds, etc. I just started experimenting with it today, and luckily I have great friends to help me out! In this photo, I had the shutter speed set to 4 seconds. I had Janet cover her face for 2 seconds, and then remove her hands for 2 seconds. This is the effect! Notice how her face is the same throughout the entire shot, but her hands (what is moving) is transparent.

Something important to note is that with a longer shutter speed, a lot more light is coming through. Therefore, you're going to have to offset all that extra exposure by turning down your ISO and making your aperture smaller. I had to use a ISO of 100 and an aperture of F22. (Remember the larger the F-Stop, the smaller the aperture).

Here,  I had a shutter speed of 6 seconds where I placed the "M" in each position for 3 seconds each. I'm a little bummed about this photo because even with an ISO of 100 and an FStop of 25, it still looks underexposed. I can process it a little bit, but our professor wants us to gain the technical skills first before we start playing with Camera Raw & Photoshop.

This photo is capturing motion (Shutter Speed: 1/250, F/3.5, ISO 1600). Ideally I would have liked to make the shutter speed even faster so that the picture could show all of her hair strands without blurring them, but I was hesitant to make the ISO any higher for fear it would come out too grainy.

I also had a little bit of fun setting up my own studio in my housemate's room (she has the best lighting with her bay windows!) and played with sprinkles. (1/200, F/3.5, ISO6400). This time around, I wasn't as concerned with the high ISO since I was only shooting sprinkles and a non-descript bowl. I'm not sure if that's the right way to be gauging things, though!

And finally, my favorite image of the day. I made Janet slap Kevin a couple of times, but none of the photos really came out. Still hilarious, though!