In motion

This past weekend, I needed to shoot photos showing motion for an assignment in a course I'm taking. I was not allowed to use flash which pretty much required that the shots be done outside. In the winter in New England, outdoor motion photography is hard to come by except on the ski slopes so that's where I headed with the camera.

There are two primary ways to illustrate motion in a photo and I had the option of submitting either or both for my assignment. It was an exceedingly bright day making it difficult to tell whether I was getting anything usable while we were still on the mountain so I made a number of shots with each technique and planned to sort out my submission once I got the images back to the computer. I ended up with some good examples of both techniques and submitted one of each.

The first technique is referred to as "stop motion" or "stop action". It involves using a very fast shutter speed to freeze everything in the frame. In order for this technique to work, the subject has to be caught in a position that isn't physically possible when at rest. As luck would have it, my first shot on the mountain was the best of the "stop action" shots and is the one I submitted.

200mm, ISO 200, f/5.6, 1/2000 © Richard Critz

The glare from the snow and not being able to use my goggles with the viewfinder made tracking him to guarantee that the camera focused a serious challenge and I was essentially shooting half-blind. While I would like to have caught more of his skis while he was airborne and would have liked to have the critical focus be on his eyes instead of the tips of his skis, I think this shot succeeds quite well at capturing motion.

Mega-softbox

It was a few minutes before sunrise and it had snowed just enough the night before that the schools had declared a 2-hour delayed opening. The sky was still thick with clouds, almost to the ground, and there was enough fresh, new snow to make everything clean and white again. Sounds were muffled and the air was still. In short, it was one of those rare mornings that make New England winters worthwhile!

The clouds and the snow also made the light amazing. It was broad and soft, with no harsh shadows. It really was like being inside a gigantic softbox. The challenge, of course, was to make the camera see and, more importantly, reproduce what I was seeing. These are exactly the conditions that highlight the difference in dynamic range (the difference between the brightest highlights and the darkest shadows) between the human eye and a camera. The eye is so much more capable of adjusting to extremes.