Dam Decisions

If you read The Westerville News, and you should, the photo above was the lead photo in yesterday’s edition. It was my scene-setter. My insurance photo.

From this vantage point, I had several choices for photos.

This was the photo I intended when I parked at the bottom of the hill and traipsed up the incline to try to position myself at the driver’s height to see the same angle I saw driving down. Then I started to think too much.

My first photos were at a shutter speed high enough to slightly stop the action of the water flow. A crystal-clear stop-action photo would have been slightly jarring detailing the chaotic action of the water. That action isn’t something our eyes can resolve and when seen in a photo it looks unrealistic. The photo above was made at 1/80 of a second at f10 and ISO 100.

The photo above was shot at 1/640 of a second at f6.3 and ISO 250. The sharp details of the water starting to reach terminal velocity in the form of droplets and rivulets seem unnatural and foreign to our senses. The colors are slightly different in all photos as shadows crept over the spillway.

Then I started to get fancy. Began to pull files from the photographer’s database telling me that slower shutter speeds might give it a dreamy look. Still a foreign view but perhaps metaphorical in casting chaos as something that we don’t see or understand but know it is there.

Slowed the shutter to 1/10th of a second. Changed the ISO to 100 and set the f-stop to f32, the smallest I could do. (I did have to edit out a couple of dust spots on the sensor.}

Holding a camera for 1/10th of a second is a learned skill. Measured breathing, wide stance, arms at your side, relax the shoulders, slowly press the shutter, relax, and repeat. Adding in shooting with your shoulders at an oblique angle to the subject is also helpful. Squared shoulders are for military formations. Oblique is for photographers. It pushes the camera closer to your body.

My personal favorite is the super-blurred photo. However, I didn’t select it as the opening photo for The Westerville News because the effect would be too distracting from the subject matter. Readers would wonder about the blur and not properly sense the volume of water.

In this case, too much knowledge was a bad thing. Simplicity was a much better idea.

I got caught up in the mechanics of making a photo. A photo I thought would be better with an unusual technique. A technique with results that would elicit awe from a viewer. It might get a favorable response from another photographer but unlikely for someone wanting to understand how much water was flowing over the dam which was the original intent.

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