The Canon 20D DSLR: First Impressions in the Field
Pages: 1, 2, 3

Art for Art's Sake

Keeping in mind that not all of life consists in motion, I spent as much time as I could afford wandering around looking for artful shots. Because people have lawyers, and I don't carry release forms with me, I tend to shoot buildings and scenery. I struck gold when I found a very nice fountain in Boston's Back Bay.

Water is one of my favorite subjects because it is constantly changing and just looks good catching lights and creating shadows. In particular, I like shooting water both at really fast and really slow shutter speeds. The slow shutter speeds add a nice dreamy effect to the moving water, while the fast shutter speeds turn the water into ice, often revealing shapes and patterns that I cannot see with my eyes.

One of the things I was keen to try was the new 1/8000 of a second shutter speed. I knew that in combining a fast shutter and a high ISO (to enable a decent depth-of-field), I'd get some reasonable shots. But I had never imagined the totally frozen-in-time images that I was about to see. Picture after picture came out completely clean, properly exposed, in sharp focus, and frozen as if an instant cold snap had somehow come over the area (see Figure 4). Of course, I was previewing them on site but was even more amazed when I viewed them on the laptop back in the hotel room.

Figure 4. One of my first 1/8000-second exposures (f/7.1, 1/8000s, ISO 1600)

After playing with a lot of jaw-dropping, fast pictures, I wanted to try the slow imaging as well, so I pushed over to Av mode and dialed in the tightest aperture (f/22). After reducing the ISO down to 100, this resulted in a 1/30 or 1/50 shutter speed, so I held steady and snapped a dozen more like that (see Figure 5). The result had a pleasing calmness to it, in stark contrast to the high-speed pictures taken earlier.

Figure 5. Slow water, 1/30th of a second (f/22, 1/30s, ISO 100)

Finally, in an artful stroke of madness, I wanted an interesting background to be interrupted by the paintbrush of water as I had captured it earlier and walked carefully around the fountain looking for "that shot." Luckily, a nice blue sky framed a beautiful domed building with just the right lighting nearby, so I quickly rolled the knobs back and forth to get my high-speed shot (Figure 6) and my slow-speed shot (Figure 7) as variations on the theme. For me, those two shots are worth the price of the camera: I'm having them framed for my home office very soon (probably 11x17). The exposure and white balance are untouched in these shots; the result straight out of the camera was very usable indeed.

Figure 6. High-speed shot in the pair of themed images (f/6.3, 1/8000s, ISO 1600)

Figure 7. Low-speed shot in the pair of themed images; the focus point was the dome in the back (f/22, 1/40s, ISO 100)