The 15-Second Photo
Today’s My Final Photo, above, is the first of seven frames I made at Red Bank in 15 seconds.
On my way home I drove slightly out of the way to see if there was anything different about Hoover at Red Bank. I noticed as soon as I turned off Sunbury the single kayak, yellow, paddling away from me at a rate that would have it close enough to shore that I might be able to frame it against a nearby tree line for an atmospheric perspective of the lake.
I efficiently parked my car and retrieved my Nikon Z50 with the kit 18-140mm lens automatically zooming it to its full length. As I walked beside my car to an open spot to begin making photos I turned the camera on and rotated the f-stop ring to wide open. Then set the ISO to 1600 to compensate for the later afternoon cloudy darkness.
Then I noticed the rowing club moving rapidly coming from my left. That gave me an extra moment as they moved into the frame into a spot to match the composition with the kayaker.
I made my insurance photo, the photo that could be used if nothing else came into view or there was an obstruction, or the composition changed.
I’ve made a lot of photos at Red Bank and from this angle, I’ve always tried to use a compositional framing object of some sort to fill empty spaces and give a sense of depth to the scene.
The bare tree limbs across the top worked well as that component.
The second frame was slightly blurred by camera movement on my part. The rowers were in what appeared to be a relaxed position in the third and fourth frames.
I zoomed back to include the tree trunk as an additional framing object, but the rowers had moved their boat to a position directly behind the kayaker jumbling the composition. That’s the photo below. It’s frame number five. The last two frames, frames six and seven, looked about the same and were not workable because of the composition change.
I converted the first photo to black and white as the colors were monotone and flat. Editing into a contrasty black and white makes for a more interesting photo.
Today was a very slow photo day. I made less than 100 photos over the day. These were the last seven. In 14 seconds.
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