Shutter To Think

You can't learn digital photography in a day. Too bad that was all I had.

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by Corin Nguyen

14 January 2003   |   The most important lesson I learned in Bormio is that it's really easy to take a bad photograph with a good camera. The week before the ISU World Cup, my Minolta Dimage 7Hi arrived. After the requisite research, I ordered a digital camera that had features to allow me to take "action shots." The camera has a very impressive array of buttons. Some of which still baffle me. I figured a good digital camera would do the picture taking for me. I just had to point it at something. Was I wrong!

One week later, I'm at the rink at Bormio during the practices with an email about cameras settings from Jerry Search. The week before, I learned the significant buttons on my camera. The competition started the next day so I had one day to figure out how to take photos. I had a great camera. I had the right settings from a photographer who had taken hundreds of speed skating photos. But I didn't know photography. This is what I learned.

It's all about light

Jerry Search mentioned in his email that it was all about light. "Action shots" are dependent on getting enough light. Getting a good photo requires adjusting the settings to get enough light. The wrong settings can make your photos look like they were taken in a badly lit room even if the lights are very bright. The right setting is the one that captures a photo the way you see it. The "right" setting changes with the amount of light available.

Flash photography is not allowed during competition. So you have to adjust your camera settings to get more light.

Getting enough light with a digital camera is done with 3 settings: shutter speed, aperture and ISO sensitivity.

Depending on the digital camera, the default shutter speed on digital cameras can be 1/60 - 1/30 of a second. This is too slow for taking a photo of a skater zooming by. In that 1/30 of a second, the skater has moved significantly across the frame so the picture is blurred. To fix this, you decrease the shutter speed which clears up the blur but also lets in less light causing the photo be dark. Then you have to compensate by adjusting the aperture and ISO setting to get enough light.

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