Shutter Speed Experiments

I come to photography from a background in painting. My main interest initially was to take better photos of my paintings; but now I'm falling in love with "painting" on the computer. I have several editing, sketching, and painting programs - all of which I'm still trying to learn.



Moving from painting into photography, and now into photo-painting - which I have dubbed "phainting", raises several issues for me. First, the difference between painting and photography. Photos seem to be all about translucency. In painting we work with light and shadow, and with glazing can get some beautiful transparency - but it still has body. And if we paint thick we can get lots of body. In a photo it's always light - even the darks and shadows seem quite different from an actual painting.


A second issue involves quality and expectations. I'm definitely trying to learn to take better photos. Yet, sometimes it's the bad photo that is more interesting. And playing with the bad photo that can take me to an unexpected result I get inspired by. This may just be a very personal issue, since in painting I'm always willing to drop a preconceived notion to follow a painting to where it wants to go. My favorite paintings happen that way. They are a discovery rather than an idea materialized.


These pictures are versions of playing with shutter speed. The first ones are of a water fountain that came out way too dark. While increasing the exposure in Lightroom I got something much more interesting to me than the actual fountain. I've played with the white balance, different filters and effects in Elements, and the brightness and contrast of each.


I also played with a photo of a spinning bike tire - copying, rotating, resizing, and changing the level of transparency multiple times. Different filters and effects changed the colors.


















In this photo I've blended the water fountain and the bike tires. This is a technique I'm really into right now - combining two totally unrelated photos and letting one show through to various degrees.




The last experiment is of pipes going up the outside of a building which I blurred by moving the camera. Changing the white balance to Florescent gave me a color I liked. The only other editing is a small over-brushing of part of the dark area at the top which was too blurry in a way that subtracted from the whole composition. The one part I don't like is the lower left that got cut off in resizing for this blog. In the actual photo that angled area goes straight down to the bottom.