Did someone say bouncy castle? Yes, it got mentioned once or twice in yesterday’s post about Faye’s christening at the weekend so I thought some photographic evidence would be in order. Not photographic evidence of me on the bouncy castle – I made sure there was none of that. But photographic evidence of its existence. In truth, as you can see above, it was more of a bouncy slide, and it made for some great action shots. The secret to good action shots is shutter speed. Which is why on Saturday I found myself turning the exposure dial on the camera to that rarely used (for me) setting of “S”. No, not “S” for slide.
“S” in this context stands for shutter priority mode, and why it’s rarely used for me is that of the three variables that dictate exposure – shutter speed, aperture and ISO – the shutter speed is, within reason, the least significant, and so often tends to be the one that you let to be whatever it needs to be to give a good exposure having pre-set one or both of the other two controls.
There are situations where you do need to think about shutter speed for technical reasons as opposed to creative ones. For instance, when using flash you usually can’t set it higher than the maximum sync speed of your camera (in my case 1/250th second) so you might notice that lots of the flash-lit photographs on the blog are shot at 1/250th second. Also, in low light you need to watch that that shutter speed doesn’t get too long to hold the camera steady. Depending on the lens in use and the type of subject I’m photographing, for me that mimimum shutter speed can be anywhere between 1/4s and 1/30s.
Where you need to take control of shutter speed for creative reasons, the that “S” on the exposure mode dial can be your friend, because in that situation your priority is indeed often the shutter and not the aperture or ISO.
Photographing an 8-year-old as he somersaults off the top of a bouncy slide and slides his way down to the end is one such situation. This image was taken on a relatively bright afternoon with cloudy, but not overcast, skies and so I was able to set the shutter speed at 1/1000s at ISO 200 and still achieve an aperture that wasn’t wide open.
This was perfect for my needs – 1/1000th of a second is pretty quick, as is an 8-year-old boy in the aftermath of a somersault, so those two would hopefully sync up nicely and I’d be able to freeze motion. ISO 200 is pretty low, meaning little to no noise in the final image. And an aperture that wasn’t wide open (in this case f/5.6) meant enough depth of field to keep the important parts of the picture sharp, and a little bit of leeway on the focal plane to compensate for any difficulties the auto-focus might have keeping up.
In reality for all the shots I took on the bouncy slide/castle the autofocus did a remarkable job of tracking the fast moving subjects. As you can see in the second shot above also, from a different run, that ability of the auto-focus to keep up meant that I was able to repeatedly get good action shots of the kids (and adults) as they slid down the slide. It’s worth pointing out that the kids did so with a little bit more flair on pretty much every occasion, though 10 out of 10 for effort to some of the adults.
Recent Comments