Besides the use of light, another way to produce contrasts between different areas of your photo is the focus. If you set the focus of your camera on the central object of your scene, everything that is closer to the camera or further away from it appears blurry and unfocused in the photo. The more significant the differences in distance are, the greater the contrasts in sharpness will be. The object(s) in focus tend to appear very intense and detailed compared to a blurry background. Your actual motif becomes much clearer to the viewer because the key elements of your picture appear clearly distinguished from those that belong to the background or surroundings. Depending on what you want to draw the viewer's attention to, you can choose very different focuses for the same scenery. I would recommend to play around with different settings -- even if you believe you know what elements of your picture you want to make stand out.
Because the effect of sharpness results from the relative differences in distance of objects to the lens system of your camera, shooting from a very short distance increases the contrasts in sharpness between foreground and background objects.
The greater the distance between your camera and the scenery is, the greater the differences between the individual distances of the objects to the camera have to be in order to achieve significant differences in sharpness.
When you are taking photos of moving objects, there are a number of other things to consider, too. Firstly, you have to decide whether you want any visible motion blur in your photo at all.
If not, you have to choose a very high shutter speed (e. g. 1/200 second) which requires good lighting of your scene or a camera with a high light sensitivity. But you have to be careful: Although most cameras enable you to select a high light sensitivity (e. g. ISO 400 and higher), this does not mean that they are capable of taking decent photos at these settings. The problem that usually occurs with cheaper cameras is a pretty high amount of grain in photos taken at poor lighting. If you use a low ISO value (the abbreviation refers to the International Organization for Standardization) with a high shutter speed, your photos taken on cloudy days will appear very dark -- taking pictures at twilight or indoors will hardly be possible this way. For these difficult lighting situations you will either have to put up with the relatively high amount of grain that comes with a high light sensitivity value, or choose a lower shutter speed and accept the resulting motion blur.
If you decide to deliberately include motion blur in your photo, you can again combine a relatively slow shutter speed with a low light sensitivity. To have driving cars or running people appear blurry, a shutter speed of 1/5 second should suffice. If you are using zoom at 1/10 second or slower shutter speeds, I recommend to use a tripod or some object in the vicinity of the scene to rest your camera on. If your camera uses OIS (Optical Image Stabilization), you might not necessarily need a tripod at these shutter speed settings.
You can record the same motion in different ways. You can either keep your camera still to emphasize the movement of the objects in your scenery, or you can follow one of the moving objects in the scene to let it stand out clearly visible and have the surroundings appear blurred. Especially in the latter case OIS can be very helpful since it smoothens the movement of the camera, balancing most of the shaky nuances of it.
The use of a slow shutter speed allows you to capture the movement of several fractions of a second (or even several seconds) in one still picture. In my opinion, displaying visible movement using this technique is a very effective way to add one more dimension to your photos: time.
(c) Dino Schachten 2010. All Rights Reserved Worldwide.
No comments:
Post a Comment