Composition Photo Workshop

Chapter 4. SLICING TIME: DESIGNING WITH SHUTTER SPEEDS

SHUTTER SPEED AND DEPTH OF FIELD: A DELICATE BALANCE

FREEZE OR BLUR: HOW SHUTTER SPEED AFFECTS A SHOT

USING A MOTOR DRIVE

PANNING

Photography can do more than capture time. It can make the invisible visible, exposing aspects of the world that, prior to photography, were beyond the powers of perception. Indeed, this is one of the miracles of photographs: They enable you to observe the world in ways that your eyes, on their own, cannot. Photographs have even set the stage for scientific discoveries about movement in time and space.

For example, Eadweard Muybridge — who, during the nineteenth century, captured more than 100,000 images of humans and animals moving in myriad ways — was the first to prove that when horses gallop, they have a point in their stride in which all four feet are off the ground. In fact, Muybridge's motion studies were so thorough, animators and other artists still use them as a reference. Similarly, nineteenth-century French scientist Jules-Etienne Marey was able to capture images of cats falling in order to demonstrate just how they manage to land on their feet more often than not. Beginning in the 1940s, Harold Edgerton's photographs stopped bullets in mid-air, illustrating for the first time pre-cisely how these projectiles acted in flight (see 4-1). Edgerton, a long-time professor of electrical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is also famous for having captured on film the fireball that ...