This comes at a time when I’ve been looking for more photo lessons to teach my middle school students. I already have one where they take higher speed “frozen in time” shots and much lower speed shots where a tripod is needed, but this isn’t either of those, technically.
That’s one of the neat things about photography. You can get the mechanics down to a science, and most companies do just that, but the art of it frequently comes from knowing all the rules and saying “OK, but what if I did the thing I’m told to never do?”
And let’s face it, just like attempts at this challenge, most of the time that’s not going to work out.
The point isn’t for it to always work. It almost never will. There’s a reason why I tell my students to absolutely never set a shutter speed for 1/30 or slower without using a tripod, even with the many ways you can mitigate camera shake.
But that one time out of 10, or 100, or 1,000 (The aforementioned challenge asks for 30 shots) where it DOES work out, well … you end up talking about that shot for a long time afterwards.
So what are the things I tell my students to do, that I could have them intentionally ignore for a lesson?
- Use a tripod for low shutter speeds.
- Follow Rule of Thirds.
- Don’t put your hands in front of the lens.
- Don’t hold the camera away from your body.
- Don’t point the camera at a bright light source.
- Don’t use the built-in flash.
- Focus before taking the shot.
If I spent a bit more time on this I could probably get a year’s worth of lessons based entirely on doing what I say not to do, but this is a start.
I’m going to have to type up a few of these.