The Long and the Short of It

Preparations continue for the National Novel Writing Month. If you’re curious to watch my progress or learn more about the event, here is the link to my NaNoWriMo page.

http://www.nanowrimo.org/eng/user/404901

For this novel project (that was a pun), I plan on using photographs I’ll be taking through the month of October as inspiration and illustrations for different sections. I’ll probably do quite a bit of photomanipulation to them, adding increasingly less subtle adjustments to them in order to express the ‘fantasy’ side of the genre I’ve picked for the novel. I still have no outline, no plans, and barely a setting. That means that I will be discovering this story as I write it.

In the meantime, let me show you some neat effects that can be done with a camera before you need to take the photograph to post-production. As a segue, here is the image I’ve chosen to use as the cover to this upcoming novel.

Obviously there have been some touchups, like the text and the blur around it, and there is even a soft blur and glow to the whole image. We’ll cover how to do that at some other time. The original photograph has its own magical appeal, however, and isn’t something that can easily be done with a typical point-and-shoot camera.

Long-exposure photography is something I would like to get into more, in the future, and so I have invested in a digital remote for my d60. This will allow me to release the shutter without touching the camera, further minimizing the amount of shake that may blur or smear the image. For this waterfall, however, I was lucky enough that a steady rock and holding my breath were sufficient to keep the stones and grasses crisp and clear while the water blurred into a silk sheet.

This style of photography is used a lot for scenic waterfalls, or shots of old houses (to let the moving clouds in the background blur into obscurity), but it takes a lot of work. You have to know the spot, you have to know the time of day, and you have to be able to hold still for multiple seconds while the shutter is open. The reason that the time of day is important is because, while your shutter is open, it is absorbing more and more light. If it is a nice, sunny day, and you leave your shutter open for up to a second, then you will see nothing but glare. The image will be almost entirely white. The best times for images like this are early morning, late evening, or just before/after/during a rain shower. Obviously the rain can be dangerous to your equipment, and potentially uncomfortable, so the gloaming times of the day are perfect for photographers looking to get the long exposure image like this.

On the other hand, a dark day is very poor if you are trying to take a photograph of something in movement. To freeze the image, and reduce the amount of smearing (the opposite of what we wanted with the waterfall), you need to have a fast shutter speed. The faster the shutter speed, the less movement you will see. The best examples of this are hummingbirds and bumblebees in flight – but frozen. It looks as though they simply stopped moving in midair. For this image, I believe I may have gotten lucky and the bee actually stopped for the millisecond my shutter was open. Perhaps it was posing for me? Or just too busy eating.

A dark day would have given me a dim, greyed out image. With the shutter only open for a split part of a second, there isn’t much time for light to hit the sensor. If the day is bright, and the sun is direct, then the image will be perfectly fine, and the color will be vibrant and the details sharp. A cloud overhead will destroy the effect. A setting sun will force you to consider taking the image to post production and lightening it up, but you can never fully recover an image that is soaked in shadows.

Next week, I’ll show you some examples of how badly things can go with both a long exposure and a very short exposure. It always seems easy until you see that only one out of two dozen photographs were acceptable.

Thank goodness for an 8gb memory card.