April 24, 2007 
In
This eNewsletter:
How-To - Playing with Shutter Speeds
Industry Perspective - Truth in Journalism
What's New This Month - Olympus, Nik, JOBO, Gitzo, Lexar, and more
How-To - Black
and White “Conversions”
Vote! - Comment on your experience with high ISO settings
Workshops & Contests - Learn and Show
Shutterbug Forums - Your
Photo & Digital Imaging Source
Playing
with Shutter Speeds
by George Schaub
There
are two ways to control light in photography—aperture and shutter
speed. Put most cameras on Program, set a reasonable ISO to match the
lighting conditions at hand and shoot, and you’ll get a reasonable
picture. But as you know there’s more to both controls than controlling
exposure—they have a profound influence on what could be called
image effects. And those image effects are what can turn a recording into
an interpretation.
Aperture
is one part of the equation that determines depth of field, with focal
length and camera-to-subject distance being the others. Shutter speed
is a slice in the arc of time, with faster speeds creating thinner slices
and slower ones “fatter” slices. But in those larger chunks
of time something else happens—time is recorded in ways the unaided
eye never sees. It’s as if the camera can bring our perceptions
to another dimension, where time, space and motion begin to work in concert
and the “scan rate” of our eye is altered. Indeed, it’s
as if we had put a damper on our optic nerve, one that creates a delay
in the synapses but nevertheless keeps recording throughout the delay.
Get The Full Story
There
are numerous ways to convert an RGB image to black and white in software.
Depending on the program, its version and the level of your experience
with it, you can make a simple color to grayscale conversion, make
a simple “desaturation” click (which retains the RGB character
of the image) or get involved with fairly complex, demanding and quite
rewarding workflows. My interest here is with shooting raw and working
with converters to get a good foundation for further work in black
and white, or as a convert and print workflow without the intercession
of further software tools.
