Yesterday I posted what was to some extent a long-lost photo of the restaurants overlooking the Mill Pond in Dundrum, and mentioned a wide angle shot that I was very happy to take away from that little photo shoot. Today I talk a little more about that shot, and about the decisions that had to be made when setting it up.
You can see the restaurants from yesterday’s image to the right of this shot. If you’re not as familiar with the Dundrum Town Centre as my wallet and I, the Mill Pond sits in front of the main shopping centre, overlooked on three sides by a variety of restaurants, and at it’s centre is a fountain which, as I mentioned yesterday, puts on a bit of a light and sound and water show for the passing public every hour or so in the evenings. A bit like fireworks, but with water.
For this shot, I waited until that water show was underway and timed the exposure to capture the jets of water spraying high into the air. I wanted to capture the fountain in full flow, but at the same time I wanted to keep this as an architecture shot showing the buildings around the pond, and obviously also achieve a good exposure.
For capturing the water, I knew I would use a slow exposure. If you photograph water with a fast shutter speed you get a freeze-frame effect where individual droplets of water are distinguishable from each other. Slow that shutter speed down, and the water softens, and becomes more transparent. That transparency was important for this photograph as I wanted the building behind the fountain to show through in the final image.
To keep the shot architectural, it was important to use a small aperture, which would keep a large area of the image in focus.
What qualified as a “slow shutter speed” or a “small aperture” was up for grabs, but because it was a low-light photograph at night, I knew that I should have no problem in fulfilling both these requirements and still have a well-exposed image. Had I been shooting this during the day, even with a small aperture I may have found the shutter speed needed to be fast due to the abundance of light. At night, where light is minimal there is usually one thing certain – a fast shutter speed will almost never be an option.
In the end, I set the aperture to a relatively small f/16 and, keeping the ISO at 200, allowed the shutter speed to be whatever it needed to be for the exposure to remain good. That turned out to be 8 seconds… which is certainly a slow shutter speed, but just right to capture the jets of water in the air and still leave detail from the buildings behind them to show through.
Getting the exposure correct was actually a bit trial and error as it is hard for the camera to meter for this scene and get it right first time. That’s one of the great things about having an LCD screen on the back of the camera – you can take the shot, check the results, tweak the shutter speed, and try again.
The 8 second shutter speed required, as night time photography often does, the use of a tripod, and to minimize camera shake during the exposure I went into self-timer mode on the camera, pressed the shutter, and 5 seconds later as the timer reached zero the exposure began – the idea being that the camera moves a little when you press the shutter so the 5 second delay is enough to settle that movement and so avoid a blurry exposure.
It’s often not clear where to focus for these kinds of shots, and with an aperture of f/16 it’s not that critical so in this case I followed a landscape photography rule of thumb which says to focus about 1/3rd of the way into the frame.
I believe the security staff at the Dundrum Town Centre aren’t as accommodating to photographers these days as they must have been back in 2006 when I took this image which is a pity because there are definitely some good photographs to be taken around this area, and you’d like to think that this is a public space.
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