Rollercoaster in Copenhagen

I’ve been digging through a folder called “Archive” that I have on the hard disk that stores my photographs, which contains images that pre-date my owning a digital SLR camera.  There are images in there captured on a range of film cameras, which I hope to translate to digital so that I can show some here, and others that were captured on some of the early digital point-and-shoot cameras that I owned.  Most of the photography is unremarkable, but I’m finding a couple of shots hidden in the collection that defy both the technology used and the photographer’s skill and knowledge at the time of capture.

This photograph from the Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen is a good example.  I failed to check the date it was taken in the metadata for the image when I was post-processing it before uploading it here, but I believe it was captured about 7 years ago (Update: This image was taken in June 2004).  I know this more from the fact that it was taken using a Fuji Finepix A204 digital compact camera than from my ability to recall when exactly I was in Copenhagen.  I can recall, though, the circumstances of the photograph, because I remember being pleasantly surprised that it had worked out reasonably well.

The camera was (in fact I still have it, but the screen stopped working a few years ago) a 2 Megapixel, 3x optical zoom, piece of plastic, and usefully it was powered by 2 AA batteries, which meant there was never a need to keep a battery charged up and ready to go – it was a perfect camera for travelling in this respect.  And it produced reasonably decent images.  It was plagued by the thing that still affects most compact digital cameras – a delay between pressing the shutter and the picture being taken, and that delay was the single biggest obstacle to overcome in getting the photograph above.

The rollercoaster was moving, as you’d expect, quite fast and the shutter lag required me to pre-empt its arrival by pressing the shutter before it had appeared in the frame.  This was going to play havoc with the camera’s ability to focus on the rollercoaster carriage itself, so I opted instead to focus on the track to keep that sharp.

I had no feedback from the camera on what shutter speed, ISO or aperture it was using – I don’t believe I could set those manually, or if I could I didn’t know how, so all of the exposure decisions were left to the camera.  As it turns out the camera underexposed the scene by at least a stop-and-a-half, because I had to adjust the exposure by that amount to get the frame you see above.

I can’t say I deliberated too long over choosing to frame the shot as it is framed, or over choosing to photograph that part of the track, but the fact that there is an inverted U-bend in the frame helps the photograph both compositionally and technically.

Compositionally, the lines of the track lead your eye nicely around the photo and, I think, draw your attention to the figure at the front right (as you look at it) of the carriage.

Technically, the bend helps to make that same figure the subject of the photograph, as physics dictates that he – on the inside of the bend, and so moving slower than anyone on the other side of the rollercoaster, and at a point on the track where he is moving towards the lens rather than across it – will appear sharper than anybody else.

The fact therefore that the shutter speed – 1/40s – is slow relative to the movement of the rollercoaster is less significant than it would have been if, for instance, the rollercoaster was moving left to right across the frame, which would have resulted in a photo with no area of sharpness.

Of course, most of this was a happy coincidence of where I happened to be standing rather than me thinking through the technicalities of the shot and the capabilities of my camera.  But I’m happy to take credit for pressing the shutter…. a second before the picture was actually taken.