Dr. Liz's Photo Blog: When a Mistake is Not Necessarily a Mistake

After a nice bike ride this bright, sunny afternoon, I took the girls out for some frisbee time. I didn't stop to check the settings on the camera and just started throwing the frisbee and taking pictures (yes, I really throw left-handed so I can take pictures with my right). About 30 pictures in (I usually shoot 80-100 in a frisbee session, with the hopes that I'll get a few keepers) I realized that *gasp* I hadn't changed the settings from yesterday's photos on the porch. I was on the manual setting, with a 1/400 shutter speed and an f/5.6. Oh no! Surely the photos I took were all toast; I mean it was bright and sunny out. Usually if I shoot at a shutter speed of less than 1/1000 on a sunny day, the pictures are all blown out. When I shoot on the shutter priority, where the camera picks the aperture. I immediately went to the shutter priority setting, cranked the shutter speed up to 1/3200 (what I usually use to get action shots) and breathed a sigh of relief.

To make a long story no longer than it already is, the first 30 photos weren't a complete loss. In fact, it turned out that maybe I shouldn't be so quick to just rush to the shutter priority, set a super fast shutter speed and start wildly shooting pictures...

Sheer luck, I think, but I LOVE how this photo came out - a really nice sense of motion!

A little bit of blur in the feet, but nice toofies!

Another sense of motion without losing clarity. Clearly I should play around with shutter speed some more.

Not surprisingly, when I cranked up the shutter speed, the photos lost a bit of that sense of motion. Again, I think I need to play around with a little bit slower shutter speed (and probably shoot on full manual so I can adjust the aperture for the brightness of the day). Not that the faster shutter speed photos miss the sense of motion (kind of hard when the dogs are bouncing around), but it is an interesting (and subtle) difference.