Zooming in on the subject
The autumn colours are taking their time to show through in London this year, which meant Crystal Palace Park looked a little dull today. However, dull conditions are common if you live in Britain so you just have to make the best of it.
In an earlier post I described the process of intentional camera movement (ICM), which takes advantage of lower light to create curiously blurred images. Today I worked with zoom burst, the process of twisting a zoom lens during a relatively short exposure.
For the shot above, I used a Nikkor 18-105mm zoom lens, set the shutter at 1/5, the aperture at f14 and kept the ISO at 200 - I choose to keep the ISO at the lowest setting to keep digital noise to a minimum. I choose to keep the ISO low because digital noise can spoil an image. Some might say I'm making life more difficult for myself but I find it's simpler to only have the shutter and aperture to worry about.
I focused on one of the flowers manually to avoid any shutter delay and simply twisted the lens as smoothly as I could while pressing the shutter.
The image above was achieved with similar settings, this time pointing at a larger vista. This can produce blown-out highlights so it's important to make careful adjustments to the aperture settings.
Holding the camera still is desirable, but not essential - it is possible to combine ICM by turning the camera body slightly as the zoom is twisted. However, this takes a lot of trial and error.