Shutter speed - extreme

[Mike McCarty]

There have been discussions recently about how increasing the shutter speed will eliminate the effects of either a shaky camera, or a fidgety kid in low light. I thought I'd show the effects of shutter speed in the extreme. This doesn't come up very often in our work, but I thought it might help make the point.

Recently I had the good fortune to photograph a young man as he was fly fishing. It occurred to me that, while most of the scene is fairly typical landscape, without the ability to see the fishing line the image would not be nearly as effective. As a fly fisherman whips his rod back and forth there is a great speed and motion transmitted to the line. Under normal shutter speed settings of say 125th of a second (generally comfortable for portrait work) I imagined that the line would be nothing but a blur, and maybe completely indistinguishable.

What I did was increase the ISO setting to 500. Because this was going on outside under a fairly bright sky with sun this drove the shutter speed to 2500th of a second. With this kind of shutter speed the camera was able to virtually halt the motion of the fishing line, which I think is essential in describing the scene. I think it may have been possible to do this with less speed (lower ISO), but I was not in a position to experiment so I just made a stab at it. What I gave up by doing this is some sharpness in the figure. However, the only time this would begin to show itself is when the photograph was blown up to an extreme size. There's always a bargain that you have to make.

This is the same principle that we encounter with the kids in low light only to the extreme. The ability to stop motion in it's tracks. It's an amazing thing, this was taken with a relatively inexpensive lens at 315mm at probably 75 yards and in the large file I can make out the thin leader that connects the fly to the more visible line.

The last is Winslow Homer's "channel bass."