Manipulating Exposure Settings
The light sensors and exposure settings for a pocket camera or cell phone camera don’t give much freedom of expression. They are great for shooting real images, but are very limiting as far as manipulating exposure settings to create an art photo.
Here’s a really clever way my daughter, Elizabeth Laurel, found to get an effect for an art photo she wanted that seemed impossible with the limited equipment she had. I would never have thought of manipulating exposure settings in this way.
Elizabeth writes:
As an artist, I tend to want to make anything and everything into art, including the real-life photos that I take. I took a couple of art photos like this one with my cell phone camera a few years ago. There was a trend in fine art at the time, to use harsh color contrasts, with a lot of black and white. Shadows and silhouettes were often used to create a mood that couldn’t be grasped with the true depiction of an object.
I experimented with this concept in my free time, but found that capturing the effects I wanted was harder than I had initially expected. I didn’t want to go home and just tweak the pictures I took and force it to resemble other artist’s works. I wanted it to happen naturally as a photographic phenomenon of sorts, a captured moment that could never be recreated. So I even shied away from the effect settings, I wanted it to be all natural, to capture a feeling rather than a visual image. My goal was to create an art photo that would cause the viewer to feel the intensity of the bright sunlight, icy water and hot shimmering air.
For this picture I worked with my hands. Pointing my cell phone camera in the direction of the sun, I started with my hand cupped over the lens, then took my hand off and watched the screen for the second and a half or less that it took for the light to fade into the scene. I then pressed the trigger before the light completely enveloped the picture, all the while taking in to account the little less than a second pause between the time I pushed the trigger and the time the photo would actually take. This isn’t the most graceful way to take a picture but it’s very rewarding.
Thanks, Elizabeth for a great art photo taken with your cell phone camera, and a truly innovative method of manipulating exposure settings!