Slow Shutter Shooting

Six out of ten times when I am thinking of a composition that is out of the world, dreamy, calm and soothing, it is slow shutter that comes to my mind.

Ya, going high key is an option…but the images can be too dry and shiny to be soothing. Using flashes and other forms of artificial lighting also helps many a times, giving great and extremely dynamic looking photographs, but then pushing up the F-stops makes the images a bit too sharp to be dreamy.

Slow shutter shots are great and have actually no alternative in a variety of cases.

I clicked this in Bled, Slovenia. If you have a water body, and a couple of other subjects fitting nicely into the composition, and it is almost dark or completely dark, then I think let us not talk any further and go slow shutter.

Slow shutter almost always gives amazing results with all water bodies. Ponds and lakes look silky smooth, waterfalls look like the ones in heaven, and seas look like clouds.

This above photograph below was taken in Cassiss (Southern France) sometime in the evening. This is in fact just the right time to click the seas in such a mood. All I did was squeezed the aperture small enough to ensure that the photograph is not overexposed while my shutter remains open for a long time (10 Seconds) , fixed my camera on a tripod and clicked!


The one below is called "Flowing Lava or Urban Chaos". I took it from the top floor of the Eiffel Tower. The long shutter illuminated the beautiful streets of Paris just enough to make them look like molten mass.

And then after all, shooting with a slow shutter is like having a number of huge huge flashbulbs with us, we can light up a city or an entire mountain from tip to toe with it!!!