Science behind the Artistic mind...

Springfield, Jan 1st 2008:

Capture the essence of the Mustang !
The power, the speed and the style !

The process of capturing a picture by a camera is based on the amount of light falling on the sensor. The photographer can control this element using two knobs. The size of the Aperture (Opening of the shutter) and the speed of the shutter opening. Together they limit the amount of light falling on the sensor, and hence decide how overexposed or underexposed the picture would turn out to be. Another way of working with your camera (simpler one) would be to control one of these parameters and let the camera decide to appropriately adjust the other parameter, such that the picture is correctly exposed.
On a regular point and shoot camera you might have come across some predefined settings for different mode of operations, for example the 'sports mode', 'night mode' etc etc.. This is exactly what is different in each of these modes. They set the aperture and shutter speed differently such that it is more appropriate for the mode in which you want to take the picture. And that accounts for the few of the millions of dollars the camera company spends in order to make life easy for the point and shoot users.

Now given the science behind the photography, its all about how artistic you can get with it.

Play around with the shutter speed and let the camera decide the aperture opening. You would have experienced that making the shutter speed too slow, would cause a motion blur in the picture. Think of it as the camera trying to take so many pictures and trying to put them together on one page. Hence everything that moved is now blurred. If you are a student of Signal Processing or Image Processing, you could solve the definite integral of all the images over the time of exposure.

In an artistic spirit of mind, you could now think of moving your camera along with the car, such that the car can be stationary from the camera point of view and the whole surrounding moving. Like the Newton's frame of reference model. To the camera the movement of the object (car) is absolutely stationary and the whole surrounding is moving in the opposite direction as the movement of the car or the camera.

As a student of engineering, there are few assumptions that needs to be met. For example:

* The speed of the object and the speed of the camera movement should be same.

* The motion has to be linear. And uniform speed. Accelerated motions are tougher to model and capture.

* No rotation of the object that could uncover new regions on the object. etc etc ...

But as an artist, you can assume that all these are always met. And if not then slight error would add to the artistic feeling of the picture.

With this, you now need to try a few times, to get the right shutter speed and movement of the camera along with the movement of the car. And a right combination would get you the good picture.

It took me over 20 trials to finally get one, that I think looked pretty cool !