Language and Letters

I’ve been revisiting photographs from a weekend in Berlin almost 3 years ago and post processing many of them for the first time.  At the time of that trip I was using a Nikon D50 to shoot in JPEG format, and more often than not left the photos as they were straight from the camera.  While this was perhaps a good strategy to force me to get things right at the time of shooting, it didn’t bring out the best in the images.  So it’s nice to now find some new potential amongst the set of photos from that trip.

This particular shot is by no means one of my favourites from the trip, but it does highlight how knowledge of what is being photographed, and (in the case of technology at least) how it works, can be important or even essential to get a usable photograph of the subject.

Here the subject is an LCD screen in the Judische Museum in Berlin, where you could enter your name in English and it generated your name in Hebrew. I had just entered “Ronan Palliser” to generate the result you see here and before Aoife cleared the screen to generate her Hebrew name, I grabbed this shot.

Photographing an LCD screen requires careful selection of shutter speed.  Life was made a little easier here because the contents of the screen were static, unlike, say, a television where the picture is constantly changing, but in general for photographs of an LCD screen there is an upper limit of about 1/60th of a second on the shutter speed that can be used.

The reason for this is that LCD screens refresh at 50 or 60Hz, which means that 50 to 60 times a second the picture is redrawn.  If a shutter speed quicker than 1/60s is used, the full screen won’t have been refreshed, and more likely than not, the photograph will only have a fraction of the image on the screen showing in the final exposure.

I used a shutter speed of 1/13th of a second for this shot, which gives a nice element of blur to the hand that is being moved in front of the screen to start entering a new name.

Had I been photographing a television, with a constantly changing image, I most likely would want to stick much closer to the 1/60th of a second shutter speed to avoid multiple frames of whatever is being broadcast being captured in the photograph, which would result in a multiple-exposure type image – unless of course this was the effect I was after.

The key thing is to realise the importance of the 1/60th second shutter speed for this type of subject and to use that knowledge, together with the desired artistic effect, to feed into the technical side of creating the photograph.