Another demonstration of the use of shutter speed when representing movement.
In a darkish room, I played a vinyl record (Bowie At The Beeb… disk 2, if you’re interested) and placed a small finger puppet on the centre of the LP. I then focused on this puppet with the camera set (initially) to shutter priority mode. I tried different shutter speeds.
After this I set to fully manual mode and played around a bit.
Image #1
“Hi mum!”
Even at f2.8 with ISO 3200, at 1/20th of a second this is underexposed. It was the slowest setting I could actually make the finger puppet visible. For a faster shutter speed, you’d need a flash.
Image #2
“Weeeeee!”
Slowing things down to 1/8th of a second. Motion blur is very evident, while things are a bit brighter. Still requires ISO 3200 which results in an unpleasantly noisy image.
Image #3
“Aaaaagh!”
1/4 second. Brighter, very blurred, and still needing high ISO.
Image #4
“Please….. make it stop!”
At 30 seconds, the tone arm is also showing motion blur.
Image #5
“Oh my God, I’m gonna be sick!”
At this point I switched to manual mode and stopped down to f11 and set ISO 100. I then began flicking a torch across the finger puppet, to try and capture sharp(ish) ‘ghosts’ as it went round. I failed.
Image #6
“WAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!”
Now I tried just flicking the torch across the finger puppet while it was in just one part of the rotation.
Image #7
“Dammit… I’m calling my union. I didn’t sign up for this!”
For this shot, I just swiped the light from the torch across the record once, as quickly as I could, trying to time it so that the finger puppet was facing the camera.
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