The Mayfly is coming!

The Mayfly (Ephemoptera danica) is coming......... watch this space.....

Fishing by waterfalls - shutter speed.....

Just had some more great fishing on the Usk! What a great river. While I was there I messed around with my Canon EOS 40D SLR camera. In particular I was trying to catch the movement of water by adjusting the shutter speed.... Now this may sound like a simple thing to do and, to be fair it is a simple technique. The great thing about using a slow shutter speed on water is that while the water moves, everything else stays perfectly still so the motion is really captured in the image. See the two shots below to see what I am talking about....

Image 1 - taken with a fast shutter speed to capture all the action of the water from the tiniest droplet to the fractured appearance of the water....

Image 2 - slow shutter speed captures the movement of the water giving the still image a sense of movement.

If you adjust the shutter speed you need to take that into account by changing the aperture accordingly (to avoid over or under exposure). Most digital SLR cameras have an auto adjust which is really useful. That is to say that if you change the shutter speed then the camera will do the hard bit by working out what aperture to use. This is how the above shots were taken.

So there you have it - a really simple and well known trick, but one which was pretty much new to me until a couple of weeks ago so it just might be useful to you.......

I'll be back soon,

Robbie