Nikon D7000 manual Working with Short Exposures

184David Busch’s Nikon D7000 Guide to Digital SLR Photography

■High shutter speeds with electronic flash. You might be tempted to use an elec- tronic flash with a high shutter speed. Perhaps you want to stop some action in day- light with a brief shutter speed and use electronic flash only as supplemental illumination to fill in the shadows. Unfortunately, under most conditions you can’t use flash in subdued illumination with your D7000 at any shutter speed faster than 1/250th second. That’s the fastest speed at which the camera’s focal plane shutter is fully open: at shorter speeds, the “slit” described above comes into play, so that the flash will expose only the small portion of the sensor exposed by the slit through- out its duration. (Check out “High Speed Sync” in Chapter 12 if you want to see how you can use shutter speeds shorter than 1/250th second, albeit at much- reduced effective power levels.)

Working with Short Exposures

You can have a lot of fun exploring the kinds of pictures you can take using very brief exposure times, whether you decide to take advantage of the action-stopping capabili- ties of your built-in or external electronic flash or work with the Nikon D7000’s faster shutter speeds. Here are a few ideas to get you started:

■Take revealing images. Fast shutter speeds can help you reveal the real subject behind the façade, by freezing constant motion to capture an enlightening moment in time. Legendary fashion/portrait photographer Philippe Halsman used leaping photos of famous people, such as the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Richard Nixon, and Salvador Dali to illuminate their real selves. Halsman said, “When you ask a person to jump, his attention is mostly directed toward the act of jumping and the mask falls so that the real person appears.” Try some high-speed portraits of people you know in motion to see how they appear when concentrating on something other than the portrait.

■Create unreal images. High-speed photography can also produce photographs that show your subjects in ways that are quite unreal. A motocross cyclist leaping over a ramp, but with all motion stopped so that the rider and machine look as if they were frozen in mid-air, make for an unusual picture. When we’re accustomed to seeing subjects in motion, seeing them stopped in time can verge on the surreal.

■Capture unseen perspectives. Some things are never seen in real life, except when viewed in a stop-action photograph. Edgerton’s balloon bursts were only a starting point. Freeze a hummingbird in flight for a view of wings that never seem to stop. Or, capture the splashes as liquid falls into a bowl, as shown in Figure 7.3. No elec- tronic flash was required for this image (and wouldn’t have illuminated the water in the bowl as evenly). Instead, a clutch of high intensity lamps and an ISO setting of 1600 allowed the camera to capture this image at 1/2,000th second.