February 24, 2012

Gesture Is King!


Another photo from 2011 and another question about what was I thinking.
Here, I saw this frog character approach this boy and knew that there was about to be a good photo.  I asked the boy’s parents if I could take a photo and they agreed.
Looking over the metadata, I can see that I shot the photo at 38mm rather than 70mm.  Why?  The photo is about the gesture, not getting all of the boy and the frog into the photo.  Next, I see that I used f/11, which I can accept but that forced me to shoot the scene at 1/125th of a second—too slow to stop the boys hand from blurring.
Thanks to Jay Maisel workshop and a little (very little) knowledge on my part, today I would have had my camera set at ISO 1600 which in turn would have resulted in a shutter speed of 1/1000th of a second—fast enough shutter speed to stop the boy’s hand.
Lessons learned:  street photography means using ISO of 1,600 or higher unless blur is an important element of the photo and make what drew you to the scene the most important element within your frame.
Enjoy. 
Camera settings:  Nikon D3, ISO 200, Nikon 24-70mm f/2.8 at 38mm, f/11 and 1/125th of a second.
Post Processing:
Lightroom 3:  Set black and white points, added contrast with a mild curve and cropped second image to simulate lens at 70mm (guess on my part!).

2 comments:

  1. Why not shoot it like you did and just crop?
    Allen

    ReplyDelete
  2. I agree with your comments about gesture is the most important element of this photo but I cannot help but wonder how you can always make sure that your crop and settings are correct to get it.
    Peter

    ReplyDelete