Ready, Aim, FIRE!

Remember a while back when I mentioned that I had three updates to the blog all prepared and ready to go?  Time to use up one of them.  This set comes to you originally from November 11th, 2013.  For Remembrance Day, I headed out to McGill University in downtown Montreal for the annual ceremony.  You can see some of the other photographs I took during the event by following this link.  Those of you with sharp eyes will notice that it says '2013' on the watermark.  That's because I actually had these photographs ready to put up here on the blog back in November, but other things came up, and these guys ended up getting pushed back.  Most of the time you hear me talking about the aperture when I'm discussing the photographs that I took, but this set was purely about shutter speed.  I didn't find myself in a great location to take some photographs of the actual remembrance ceremony, so I broke off from the pack near the end and headed to the back of the grounds where all of the heavy artillery was located.  Part of the official ceremony is a 21 gun salute.  I wanted to see if I could capture the muzzle flash of the gun going off.  For that, you need lots of shutter speed.  I originally began shooting at f/2.8, but it would blur out more of the image than I wanted.  After a couple of blasts, I settled on f/7.1 as a good aperture as it kept everything nice and clear.  It was kind of an overcast morning though, so shooting at f/7.1 presented problems for speed.  That meant it was time to up the ISO.  I took shots at several different ISO's, beginning at 100 before finally ending up at 800, which offered me enough speed to get the photo that I wanted.  By looking through the viewfinder, I was able to see what speed the camera had calculated to use for me.  Foolishly, I thought I'd be able to catch the flash just by listening for the gunner as he made his call and trying to snap the photo as the gun went off.  All I ended up getting was smoke, smoke and more smoke.  No way was I fast enough to try and shoot by ear.  That meant it was time to shoot in Burst mode.  Essentially, I put my finger on the trigger and let the camera shoot away. On my fourth attempt, I finally got what I wanted, fire coming out of the gun.  The first photograph was taken at f/7.1, 1/2000sec, ISO 800 at 55mm.  The second photograph was taken at f/7.1, 1/2000sec, ISO 800 at 55mm.  Here are the final two photographs to finish the set.

f/7.1, 1/2500sec, ISO 800 at 55mm

f/7.1, 1/3200sec, ISO 800 at 55mm

You may have noticed the speed went up on those last two shots.  I was shooting in AV mode, meaning that I chose the aperture and the camera chose the shutter speed.  The sun must have broken through a little more on those last two shots so the camera adjusted by upping the speed a little bit.  It's fun to look through these photos like an old-fashioned flip book, and watching the gun go off through my pictures.