Metal

This weeks assignment was METAL. At first I had no idea what I was going to take a picture of but as I pulled into our driveway today Terry was welding something in the front garage. As soon as I saw the sparks I knew that is what I wanted to photograph for the assignment and I even had my camera on my front seat so I went to work. I shot 30+ photos and was having a tough time getting a usable picture. All I would get was a blue glow or my camera would focus and refocus as I tried to take the picture. It was frustrating but I did get this one {and only one} photo that I posted for the instructor to critique. {I told her of the trouble I was having and asked what I should have done}

And this is what she said:

Wow! I could see the thumbnail on this and had no idea what it was until I opened it up. I love that you thought to take this picture. This is all about shape and light. Handholding this at 1/25 can cause blur. If you get another opportunity to shoot this, keep using aperture priority but try increasing your ISO to 400 or 800 to see what you get. This is kind of like shooting fireworks. You try a lot of different things to see what works! Aren't you happy you have a digital camera rather than trying this with film? :) I also think it would be cool to get some close ups of your husband's hands as he is doing this work. Great job!

I also took these of just the metal because I like the way the fading light hit it.

After reading Barbara's advise {the instructor} I decided to try again. Tonight I went back to the garage and bracketed the ISO from 100 to 1600 but still no luck. I wasn't getting anything until it dawned on me that my biggest problem was the fact that once I focused my camera would refocus and I would lose the shot. So in the end it didn't matter what ISO but I took my camera off auto focus and got a shot with an ISO of both 200 and 1600 - so go figure. 

                       ISO 200                                                  ISO 1600

Both manual focus - it seamed to do the trick however it was still a bit hard to get the sparks and I had to make sure it was focused in the right spot but it was fun trying - lucky for me Terry was willing to indulge me. In the end I like the first picture I got the best but I think it had to do with the lighting. It was in the evening as the sun was setting which is a much softer, beautiful light compared to the afternoon light of the second try.

The artist