Picking Back Up

Well, I've been wanting to get out and take some specific pictures for a long time now, and today I was finally able to do it. I put the camera in shutter-priority mode, and went to visit a fountain at one of our parks with my tripod. I've decided that I like the S-priority & A-priority modes better than the full manual, because the interface for adjusting them is a bit awkward, and it's very time consuming to do full manual. It'll be a feature to pay attention to when I'm buying my next camera.



It's a gorgeous day today, perfect early fall weather. That was part of why I wanted to go out today. That, and I knew they will be turning off the fountains sometime soon, and I wanted to get this project done. The very fast shutter speed froze the water; you can see droplets in a couple of places. The rainbow is a lovely bonus!



Here you can see better the droplets, with the very quick (1/1000) shutter.


1/800 of a second. Not a lot of difference, but you can see some in the center spray and the feet splashes to the far left, when compared to 1/1000.


1/640 of a second.


1/500 of a second. It's starting to be noticeably more like sheets of water at this point.


1/400 of a second.


1/320 of a second.


1/250 of a second.


1/200 of a second.


1/160 of a second. At this point, my batteries died. I still had just a couple of f-stops that I could have used, but the camera was done, and my "fresh" batteries were also dead. Bummer. In addition to not really finishing this, I also didn't get any pictures of the kids playing at the playground or in the fountain!

One thing that's interesting is that the little "icicles" of water running off the orangy part of the fountain get longer and longer the slower the shutter goes. I'm actually having a hard time deciding what I like best: 1/800 is very nice, but so are the last couple on the slowest shutter speeds. It's hard to say. I think I may do this again, but point the camera at some running kids and see what I can come up with there.