Ty's Photographic Education
Lesson 2: Out-Of-Synch
I call these type photographs "out-of-synch" because they are slightly out of synch with reality. Perhaps for brevity, camera manufacturers have dubbed it "slow synch."
This photograph was done in New Orleans, Louisiana with a Nikon D70 using the built in speedlight flash set to Slow Rear Curtain Synch mode. In this particular image, I wanted to do a shot that would please both the girls family and myself.
That meant a shorter exposure with less camera shake so you could still make out the girl, the bat, and the ball. In this case it was shot with the very last remaining ambient light left in the day, almost an hour after sunset. I used a 24mm lens with no filter, ISO 200, and exposed for 1/2 second at f/5.6. I watched the pitcher, waited for the ball, and when it got in the frame, I just moved the camera to follow the ball, slightly downward and to the left.
As with all these type of photographs, I hand-hold them and move the camera during the exposure so it blurs most of the image except for where I point the flash. I do this because it says right in my D70 manual that "use of tripod is recommended to prevent blurring caused by camera shake." Some photographers might follow that advice, but I'm not one of them. You know that early lesson you learn in photo class or your camera club that says, "first you have to learn the rules before you can break them?" Well, I learned and I break. I actually prefer the overall blurness for my vision. God forbid I get a straight line.
I love how the camera appears to not understand what I'm doing or what it is that I want, so it gives me whatever it can. I love how colors blend when I move the camera so it looks like a painted streak. I move the camera in all different ways and for a variety of times, usually between a half to 4 or 5 seconds, but sometimes longer.
It took a couple tries for this one because the little girl didn't know what I was doing. All she saw was that a flash kept going off in her face and she kept missing the ball. I wanted to get the ball as close to her bat as possible without showing that she missed it. On this shot, she actually did connect so the next shot I took is the one of her running to third base because she didn't quite know the order to the bases. I'll put that shot at the bottom of this post.
Now for the rest of the story exclusive to the website:
This is my world so welcome to it. I guess I'm trying to show you some of what I see, or more specifically what I don't see. I've been wearing glasses since I was a kid. I've never been able to see much without them. Now that I've gone over the hill and am quickly sliding down the other side of life, my eyes are getting even worse. Top that off with a medical condition that has almost killed off my right eye, and you're left with a lot of blurs, leaks, curves, blended colors, and things that aren't so clear. It also comes from being a photojournalist and running after a picture. They don't always come out so clear.
I began doing these kind of photographs while I was a photography (and journalism) student at Virginia Intermont College almost 30 years ago. I learned a lot about sharpness and copied my hero Ansel Adams for a while, and then I began to learn and express my own vision. I started doing these with my 35mm Canon FTb and AE1 film cameras. I used to hate that I never knew what I was going to get as I was shooting it. Being a starving student, I couldn't afford as much film as I would have liked to experiment more. I mostly put it aside and didn't do much of them until I finally got a digital camera and could see what my results were and either adjust or delete without costing me any more for film processing and printing.
Fast forward many years - now that I have a couple digital cameras and still do freelance photojournalism, I'm still doing this same type of work. It's not all I do, but it is still one technique I like. Here's the next shot that came after the one above:
Thanks for reading. As always, feel free to leave feedback on my blog (link below). - Ty