A Day in the Life

With Spring Break finally here, I'm doing my best to try and forget that TED talks are comming FAST. In fact, I'm still in denial mode right now, which means I basically I tell myself I still have five looong days and nights to ponder what exactly it is I plan on sharing to my panel of unimpressed peers and two teachers. Which is probably not a very good strategy. But even in the midst of my busy schedule of alternating between conciousness ( where I eat and stare blankly at my pile of homework) and unconciousness, I have managed to keep up with my scehdule of taking photos.
This week's focus was on action photography, which really built off of everything that I have learned so far. Besides being able to adjust the lens and capture the best lighting, action photography really required some more toggling with my camera. The mode also required some detailed reading, which, having some time on my hands, I did. Two important aspects of action phtography are 1. shutter speed and 2. 1st and 2nd Curtain Sync Flash. I found a lot of information about shutter speed here and here. I won't bore you terribly with the details, so here's just a quick synopsis about shutter speed:

Shutter speed: Basically shutter speed is the measure of time the shutter is open. A fast shutter speed freezes an image in action, while a slower shutter speed creates a blur of motion. The slowest possible shutter speed for my camera is one second, and the fastest is 1/800th of a second (which is pretty crazy). Shutter speed is important to action photography because a photographer needs to decide whether to use a slow shutter speed and capture that trail of motion, or a fast one, and capture the subject frozen in motion. I've experimented with both effects this week.

And then there's 1st and 2nd Curtain Sync Flash. These two options are really only used for slow shutter speeds. I read a little into it, but the first few sources I found made it seem really complicated. However, after reading this I basically understood the general idea.

Slow Sync Flash: The difference between 1st and 2nd Curtain is when the flash fires. A camera actually has two shutters that form the actual camera shutter; one that opens in the beginning of the shot and one at the end. These two flashes create that light trail behind a subject that you see in those night photos. In 1st curtain, the light trail appears in front of the subject, opposite the direction of motion, which doesn't make much visual sense to me. But 2nd Curtain creates a light trail in the direction of motion, behind the subject.

Whew. So now that that's over...

This week's theme came to me after watching this documentary called "Life in a Day", which is avaliable on youtube if you want to check it out. The whole premise behind the movie was that people all over the world just videotaped their lives on one day of the year, and basically the movie consistede of little snap shots of different people's lives arranged from morning to night. Which is actually a lot more interesting then it sounds. But anyways, I wanted to follow the same idea, so I decieded to take photos of just one day of my life. I know this goes against the one picture per day plan, but I just wanted to try something new. So today, I spent every moment of the day with a camera close at hand. I isolated five different moments in my day that I think were significent and photo-worthy.

10:00 am- I was put in charge of watching my sister for the day, so I decided to spend some time outside in the morning. We had been on the trampoline for about ten minutes before my sister, being eight, declared she was bored and wanted to do something else. I cleverly asked if she wanted to try jump-roping instead and got this picture. Actually, I also took about twenty others, all of her still on the ground, so it was a bit challenging getting the timing right. 



3:00 pm- Haha, this was such an enjoyable picture, mostly because I got to be in it. This just perfectly captures my feelings after trying to get through my science homework. Photo credits go to my mom on this one, although I should have made the room brighter because the lighting is kind of bad. Shutter speed was at about 1/640 (very fast) to capture all those papers in mid-air. Not to worry; those papers wern't very important. But I did consider ripping up my thirty page Social Studies midterm review.

 5:00 pm- Preparing for dinner! Probably my favorite photo of the day. For one thing, I really spent some time trying to stage this display. The black-lidded appliance is probably not something you have at home: it's a rice cooker. Rice is a major part of the chinese diet. In mandarin, the term for "it's time to eat" is "che fan", which literally translates to "eat rice". And yes, I do eat rice most days for dinner. The hand you see is my sister's. She had a great time spilling the rice everywhere. I had less of a great time cleaning that up.

7:00 pm- My sister wanted  to go to the mall after dinner. I really don't like going to the Plymouth Meeting Mall because it's eerily silent, but they also have a pretty cool carousel So yeah, while other teenage girls walked by with their bags, I stayed for fifteen minutes in front of a carousel watching the horses go up and down while spinning slowly. I took this one after it just stopped, but you can see the spinny chair thing is still going. The girl on it looked like she was having a great time, but quite frankly, I'd choose a horse over a spinny chair any day. 

8:00 pm- Just before we left the mall, I HAD to take a night photo of cars. So I set up my tripod in front of TD Bank on Germantown Pike, right before the entrance to the highway, and snapped away. It was actually pretty exhilarating because most of the cars were going over the speed limit and you could almost feel them zoom by. I really slowed the shutter speed here ( 1/5) to get that blurry effect. After about five minutes though, my fingers were almost too frozen to click the shutter.


This was by far the most challenging mode yet. Which is good, because it means that I'm making progress and tackling bigger challenges in photography throughout the course of this project. But I also have sixty four photos of cars in the night that I had to go through before finding the one above. For all my photos, I had to take MANY many shots before I found one that got the motion at the perfect time. Next theme, I will be adjusting all my settings! With the deadline coming fast I might have to cram a little....