Whilst talking about shutter speeds during last weeks class I remembered a lecture I went to by Brian Cannon who is a British graphic designer, art director and photographer who has crated iconic album covers for numerous Britpop bands such as Oasis and The Verve. These album covers were often meticulously styled and created to be shot with little retouching. The one that I recall him discussing was The Verve’s greatest hits cover which sees a slow shutter speed creatively capture a waterfall with a live lit neon light in the middle of it. (Apparently if health and safety were there they would have shut it down!)
I decided that running water would be a good start to practice using shutter speed priority on my Canon EOS 400D (This is my personal camera; at work we use Nikon D600/D800, so good to get practice with both.) I headed to Backarrow cascades for some fast running water.
Initially, I found it quite difficult to get the speeds right so they weren’t bleached out or too dark, but after a few attempts at different speeds and realising that the amount of light avaliable was high (so I didn’t need to have the shutter open for as long as I thought for the slow exposures) I managed to get milky, smokey movement of water with the slow shutter speed and a sharper movement shot using a faster shutter speed. Image progresssion below:
I tried the technique in a couple of different areas of the river to grasp the technique:
I’ve also looked at other inspirational phtoography featuring fast and slow shutter speeds which can be seen below:
Fast Shutter Speed:
Slow Shutter Speed:
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