Half a second

A recent thread—the one about lens reviews, I believe—got me thinking. It touched on the subjective futility of obsessions over gear (or at least its technical performance), and it cast my mind back to an image I recently captured quite by accident when I’d set the camera for a specific shot and then took a few street shots before I noticed they were exposed for half a second. I liked the result for its slight ambiguity and the ephemeral presence of the people in the image, and other such pretentious artistic reasons.

At this point, gear becomes moot: handholding such a shot makes all technical details irrelevant, and the most basic of cameras will suffice. A reasonable response to the thread, then, and given that I’ve lately rekindled a Hockneyesque frustration with the relationship between photography and time, it seemed a good… er, time to start experimenting again. (Though this is a very non-Hockneyesque response to that relationship.) And an experiment it is—the results are unrefined, I need to work on the relationship between the movement of the subject and the movement of the camera. (The latter is integral here; a long exposure with a stabilised camera is not the same thing.)

Anyway, I offer these merely as devil’s advocate—as an antidote to gear. I have no doubt that to most viewers on a gear-centric forum they will have little or no appeal, but to be honest I‘m a contrarian by nature andI instinctively default to a preference for the unpopular over the popular.

(In the end, gear unwelcomely came into the equation, as what was intended to be a mini-project of uniformly half-second exposures was thwarted by a glitchy dial that resulted in exposures anything up to three seconds, which—given that I shot everything from the hip—went unnoticed for quite a while… hey ho

Some images, then, for those who care little for technicality… or, perhaps more truthfully, for those who do, They’re not offered in the hope of being liked; merely in the acknowledgement of eschewing all care about equipment.

Neat. I like this set, it captures  dynamic environments very effectively.

What were your settings?

JSalk53 wrote:

What were your settings?

Shutter set to 1/2sec (until it went wonky), auto iso with a max of 6400, snapshot 2m mode (only available on the XF10) which locks the aperture at f/8.

To be fair I would have been better off using one of my Ricohs, as their better snap focus modes allow any aperture. The XF10 was unusable at half a second in broad daylight at f/8 (manual focus is available and would avoid being stuck on f/8, but is way too easy to knock out of line).

Oh—it’s gear again 😀 (But it’s ok—we’re talking usability rather than technical performance.)

Hi Jeff,

They're interesting.  Heck if you hadn't told us that they evolved as the product of a fortunate accident, we 'd have given you cred for being arty!!!

Cheers, Rod

Rod McD wrote:

Hi Jeff,

They're interesting. Heck if you hadn't told us that they evolved as the product of a fortunate accident, we 'd have given you cred for being arty!!!

I’m always inclined more to art than technical competency, but I’m never 100% sure whether that’s purely because I lean that way or whether it’s partly just a convenient cover for a shortfall in technical competency 😉