This is another photo project inspired by Freeman Patterson’s book Photography and the Art of Seeing. This time I’m doing my thinking sideways deliberately breaking a rule.
Rule : For slow shitter speeds (less than 1/60 sec) secure your camera on a tripod.
Sideways: Why not see what happens if I move the camera!
I have had a homemade string monopod for sometime now. Its really easy to operate, I just screw in the connector to the tripod socket, let the cord dangle to the ground, then step on it and pull the camera up a little till the chord is tight. On my recent trip to Canada although i had taken a travel tripod I mainly used this simple homemade device to stabiles my photos, because it is fast to set up and simply rolls up so it is always in my camera bag. It is also teriffic for macro work in the field where you can arc into the best position to focus and keep the camera stable.
My idea was the photograph some flowers from above with the camera swinging back and forth. Really easy to do I set the camera to a very slow shutter (1/8 sec) low ISO (100 ASA) and higher Fstop because it was daytime. Then I set the camera time for a delay, and my canon has the ability to then take a number of photos about 2 seconds apart. I stood on my front deck and dangled my camera over the flowers below and like a apprentice puppeteer, tried to swing the camera back and forth then let it spiral down. Ten shots is not many but that's all I took. AND I was amazed with what I had shot. There are only 2 photos here (and certainly I enhanced them in Nik’s software) but more than half the photos were pretty decent.
As Freeman warns this approach may be a bit formulaic and should be used with constraint BUT moving the camera can work really well.
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