Archive for October, 2008
Quiet falls
For a very long time I’ve been wondering why I like to use long shutter speeds with moving water. I’ve just always liked it, from the very beginning of my photography career – it was the reason I bought my first polariser filter and I still remember the first waterfall I used it on. In the last few days I’ve been thinking about this issue, inspired by the comments for my Sunday’s post and also Miika’s waterfall post when I was writing a comment for it. Then it suddenly dawned on me and it was so obvious I can’t believe I wasn’t able to figure out a long time ago! It all comes down to my concept of “quiet picture”.
I strive to achieve harmony in my pictures (the operative word being “strive”). Ideally, everything is in balance – if something is out of place, it will stick out and disturb, be it an element that doesn’t belong, bad composition, highlight or whatever. A balanced picture is thus quiet and the less elements you have in a picture, the quieter it usually becomes. Using shallow DOF in macro photography is a way to eliminate elements in the picture. A long shutter speed achieves the same thing in landscape photography. I use a long shutterspeed even when the analytical part of my brain says that a shorter speed would be more appropiate, the picture on the left is definitely such where I recognise that freezing the water would probably work better. But now that I know why I’m using a long shutter speed, I no longer have to worry about the “right” speed to use. The right exposure is the one that comes naturally to me!
One trick fits all
Sometimes I find a trick which I like so much that I use it for all my photos. Long exposures are my trick du jour, so now I’m taking hardly any pictures with shutter speeds lower than a second. You can never be quite sure what you get with this type of images while you’re taking them, so the idea is to take loads of pictures with varying shutter speeds and then on the computer pick out the best. Digital helps.
Might as well keep taking these until the season is over… when the leaves have fallen and grass has withered brown, it’s time to come up with something else!
The weather was sure changing today. In the morning it was heavy winds and rain, even some sleet at one point, and then at lunchtime the clouds moved away and by sunset it was almost windstill and clear skies. It worked fine for us at Hylströmmen, but sunset was a miss.
Note to self: find sunset locations!
5 commentsNo bad weather
The day dawned foggy and drizzly, but all the weather forecasts I checked said it would get better. Rather optimistically, I trusted them and set out to the Kvarnsjön lake, which is an easy 3.5 km hike from home. Only problem was that it started raining shortly after I set out, and by the time I was at the lake it was pouring. And also rather optimistically, I had opted not to wear any waterproof trousers (my jacket is (almost) waterproof). But it’s not all bad, after a while you get wet enough to stop caring if you get any more wet.
I made some lame attempts at photography, the Stormjacket was protecting the camera anyway but my enthusiasm was rapidly waning in correlation with the wet and cold creeping up on me. When I got home, I was still freezing after dry clothes, a bowl of hot soup and a cup of tea.
There’s no bad weather, there’s only bad judgement for not wearing bad weather clothes.
1 commentTest your colour IQ
Try out your colour vision at FM 100 Hue Test! When I was using film, I used to have a lot of problems getting the colour balance right in the scans. Now with digital, Lightroom does a great job with white balance and if I’ve needed to adjust WB manually, I seem to get it quite nicely in the ballpark. Maybe experience does help. Anyway, considering these problems I used to have and still sometimes do, I had been thinking that my colour vision is seriously impaired. But apparently not, because I got a perfect score on this test! Can’t believe it.
3 commentsWeather – September 2008
Nothing special to report about September… not a lot of rain though. My barometer broke on the 9th and I haven’t bothered to replace it yet (I’m not getting much out of the barometer data anyway, I’m really only interested in the temperatures and precipitation), and then I had a week’s holiday so 6 days of observations are missing overall.
* * *
Temperature (High): 14°C
Temperature (Low): 5°C
Temperature (Average): 9°C
Barometer (High): 1009 mbar
Barometer (Low): 984 mbar
Barometer (Avg): 998 mbar
Total of sunny days: 3
Rain: 30 mm
Days with rain: 8
* * *
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