To tyro: Shutter speed

[mjw364]

Hello John

Thank you for your kind words. I'm sure you have heard Robert Capa's famous "If it's not good enough, you are not close enough"? Combine that with one rule of composition that states "fill your frame with the subject", mix in a bit of "what was it about this scene that caught my eye most strongly?" and then apply the general compositional rules that we are all familiar with and there you go... a waterfall picture in the lake district! How unique and original! Well, for someone who prefers modern architecture as a subject for inclusion in his TE gallery, it is!

Shutter speed was not really much of a long one on this - I braced my elbows against my knees since I had borrowed Will my tripod and he was upstream - and I shot it at 0.6 of a second at F22. That was actually a one third underexposure on the actual meter reading. Playing around with such settings is a doddle on my XT1 since all manual controls are to hand and can be manipulated without having to change things in a menu, where such things are usually buried!

Have a great evening - what's left of it anyway.

Cheers

Mike

[tyro]

Thank you, Mike, for your reply - your discussions are always well worth a read and again you have given some interesting points to think about. So I definitely must keep my eyes peeled and my mind open when wandering about areas such as this!

Yes, 0.6 second isn't a very slow shutter speed at all, is it? I expected it might be in the order of 2 to 5 seconds. Thanks for letting me know that. But I'm always wary of writing the word shutter here as, on more than one occasion, I've very nearly posted my note or discussion with the wrong vowel in that word. But I suppose a nasty bout of food poisoning could indeed give you a very fast sh*tter speed, couldn't it?

Sometimes I think that one of the other important points when composing a photograph is to think from the point of view of the subsequent viewer of the image. Someone came up with a rather strange mnemonic - WAIST BLA - for "What am I supposed to be looking at?" - quite a good point because so many times one looks at a photograph and wonders quite where one is supposed to look. So the important subject must be placed in a fairly obvious place in the frame.

Anyway, enough of this. Time for another cuppa and then bed.

Take care.

Cheers,

John.