Motion, Pan and Silhouette

The assignment this week was to take one pan shot, one photo with a motion blur, and one silhouette. The pan shot is a picture of something that is moving, and the object is mostly in focus (with the exception of any moving parts), while the background is a blur, showing the direction of the movement. The motion blur photo should show movement in some way; not just out of focus.The Silhouette shows objects 2 stops darker or more in the foreground, with a lighter background; typically the objects in the foreground have little to no details.

Motion

This was taken of some dancers at the Milwaukee Folk Fair International. I love the way the motion changes the patterns on the the dancers skirts, I was able to study these patterns, as the original pictures had a person's head in front of the bottom of the skirts, and I used the clone stamp to remove it. It taught me that performance photography can be challenging; every shot I took had people in front of the shot, the lighting was funny, or distracting objects in the back; photoshop helps quite a bit to remove minor distractions that you can't control otherwise. 

Pan

I also found the pan shot highly challenging; I tried taking picture of cars and trains, and most of them were too fast to get them in focus. So, I attached me camera to a tripod, and had my husband  run back and forth with treats in his hand for the cat; this was pretty much the only thing that made her run fast enough to get a pan shot of her. I turned the lights on in the room behind the cat, which added some nice lighting to her fur, and created some interesting shadows in front of her.

Silhouette

For this shot, which was taken on the edge of lake pewaukee, I adjusted the shutter speed and aperture according to the light meter while pointing the camera only at the sky.  I composed the picture I wanted with the trees and picnic table in the foreground, and then took the picture with the shutter speed and aperture unchanged.