Cotton Candy Falls

I tend to get a little bit long winded sometimes with these little blogs, but this time we'll keep things a little short.  I like to play around with my camera from time to time and during a visit to Ottawa I was directed to a little waterfall by one of my good friends.  I figured it would be a good opportunity to play around with shutter speeds.  With a waterfall, the slower speed you use, the more solid the falling water will appear.  Almost like cotton candy falling over the ledge.  In an ideal world, I would have taken a couple of shots with a tripod, but I didn't have it with me at that time so I tried to use speeds as slow as possible without falling victim to having the photo blurred by my hand.  Here are some photos of the same scene taken at different shutter speeds.

f/6.3, 1/640sec, ISO 400 at 24mm

f/22, 1/60sec, ISO 400 at 24mm

f/22, 1/15sec, ISO 100 at24mm

1/15th of a second was really pushing my luck.  In fact, it's true that I didn't have my tripod, but there was a handy wall overlooking the scene.  I put my camera on the wall and pressed the shutter because I'm pretty sure that there's no way I could have shot at 1/15th of a second without shaking the camera.  It's a fun little exercise.  As you can see, the slower speed I used, the more solid the water became.  You can try this little trick with all kinds of moving objects.  It's fun to try with cars or bikes.  You frame something solid that doesn't move, use a slow shutter speed, and wait for faster things to pass by.  I might go out try that again some day.