Exercise 3.1

Using fast shutter speeds, try to isolate a frozen moment of time in a moving subject. Depending on the available light you may have to select a high ISO to avoid visible blur in the photograph. Try to find the beauty in a fragment of time that fascinated John Szarkowski. Add a selection of shots together with relevant shooting data and a description of your process (how you captured the images) to your learning log.

I settled on the idea of capturing beauty in Water. It is always moving, it is always beautiful, to me and as Szarkowski said ‘…There is pleasure and beauty in this fragmenting of time that had little to do with what was happening. It had to do, rather with seeing the momentary patterning of lines and shapes that had previously been concealed with the flux of movement’. (Szarkowski, 2007, P5).

Photographing Water did exactly that, for me. See the lines of the water emerge and the formations of bubbles and froth appearing and disappearing as the water keeps coming. Impossible to see with the naked eye.

Monday 15th January was quite possibly the greyest, dullest day. Skies heavy with torrential wind driven rain so natural light was in short supply.

I placed an old baking tray in my kitchen sink and turned the tap on ever so slowly. Slow enough for it to drip onto the tray and create patterns and lines. I tried desperately to increase the Shutter speed higher than 250 but the available light, even being next to a south facing window was dire and my ISO was over 2000. As I tried to inch it up the quality of the photo was getting lost and as I could get pictures of the moving water droplets clear enough at this speed and to fragment motion I left it as it was.

I like these photos. It’s reminded me that simple photos can produce incredible results. It’s taught me that I should look to slow other things down that the eye can’t see and use my camera to capture it.