suits photographing in your desired destination.
Setting Light in Motion
Most photographs are captured in a fraction of a second. Quick shutter speeds eliminate motion as much as possible to give you the sharpest, clearest image. When you leave your shutter open for extended periods of time, anything moving in the frame starts to blur or streak; if the source of light moves, the light in your scene changes throughout the course of the exposure.
Some common subjects to photograph with long exposures are waterfalls, flowing creeks, rivers, and windy sand dunes. When you capture light in motion, you let go of the desire to achieve technical perfection and instead create something that's more surreal than real.
To shoot with a long exposure during the day, set your camera to its lowest ISO rating and use the smallest aperture setting available. (See Chapter 3 to get the details on ISO and aperture.) If these settings don't slow down your exposure enough to achieve the amount of motion you want, use a
Nighttime also provides a great opportunity to experiment with photographing motion. The light reflected off the moon isn't nearly as intense as direct sunlight, so you can leave your shutter open for long periods of time, capturing drastic lengths of motion. Flowing water begins to lose texture when photographed for long periods of time. A one-minute exposure can cause the ocean to appear as calm as a lake on a windless day. I exposed Figure 10–10 for 8 seconds, which caused the ocean to become smooth while maintaining some of its detail.
On nights with a full moon, I tend to include the moon in my composition or to use the moonlight to expose my scene. When the moon is just a sliver in the sky, I like to go far away from the city lights into the wilderness and use a wide-angle lens to compose a scene that has a great deal of sky in it. With such a small intensity of light in the scene, you can leave the shutter open for hours and capture the illusion of the stars moving through the sky. Of course it's the earth that's rotating, but your camera is grounded here and records the stars as moving. This phenomenon is referred to as
Base your nighttime composition around the position of the North Star because that's the only star that remains in the same spot throughout the night. The other stars circle around it, creating a neat effect in a photograph. Also, make sure your camera battery is fully charged before starting your exposure; otherwise you may run out of juice before the exposure is complete. (Check out Chapter 14 for more info on photographing nature.)
Figure 10–10: Photographing a scene at night makes capturing light in motion easy.
Accounting for the Color of Light
The impact of color in your scene comes not just from the color of the elements in it but also from the color of light in it. Each light source you use in a scene has a dominant color. Light burns at a specific Kelvin temperature, and that temperature determines the color of the light. The term
Here's how lights commonly used in photography fall into the Kelvin scale:
1000K = candlelight
5500K-6000K = direct sunlight
' 9000K = open shade (subject is in shadows that are exposed to the blue sky)
Your digital camera's sensor reacts differently to each of these light temperatures, which is why the camera has a separate setting to shoot in each one of them. You access your camera's color balance through the shooting menu. Refer to your owner's manual to find out how your specific camera enables you to choose the color balance.
When preparing to take a photo, evaluate the lighting in your scene and determine which setting will provide the most appropriate results. For instance, when you're indoors and regular household lights are lighting your scene, set the camera's color balance to tungsten. When you're outdoors, shooting in cloudy conditions, set the color balance to the overcast setting.
The way you see things in the direct sunlight is what you use as the standard for how things should look. And your camera does the same. Your
' If you shoot in the daylight and set your white balance to tungsten, the image will come out extremely blue. This can be used as a creative technique to produce images with a cool, blue tone.
' If the sun is out and you want to create the warm feeling of sunset but it's only 3 p.m., simply set your color balance to the overcast setting. The result will be a warm image. If you want to make it even warmer, set the color balance to the open shade setting.
On an overcast day, you can set your color balance to the sunlight setting in order to create a photograph that has a cooler tone.
Photographers used to place color filters in front of the lens to achieve all these results, but with digital cameras you can control the color balance with the camera's settings and don't have to purchase expensive filters.
Do some tests with the different color balance settings on your camera in different lighting scenarios and figure out which scenarios cause effects that you find interesting. You can control the color of your photographs with photo-editing software as well. I show you how to do so in Chapter 18.
Chapter 11. Adding Interest through Framing and Formatting
Creating a compositional frame within a frame
Formatting your images according to your subject, message, and environment
