Photogames

John Baldessari

John Baldessari is known as the father of conceptual art for his unique ideas and his dependency on the concept of luck. His works compiled elements of game-playing, accidents and chance, and he used different camera settings to enrich them. One of these settings that he used was different shutter speeds, which we experimented with in this photoshoot.

Shutter speed

Shutter speed within a camera controls exposure, or the amount of time the shutter has to let in light while capturing the image. It is measured in either full seconds, or fractions of a second, the shorter the exposure, the clearer and less motion-blurred the photograph will be. Longer exposures are typically used when the camera is supported by a tripod, as the camera usually shakes quite a bit when held in a photographer’s hand.

Photogames – Shutter speed (Shadowboxing)

We used different shutter speeds (1/30, 1/150, 1/250) to capture movement. First we took images of different movements by shadowboxing with the cameraman – here’s some of the better results.

All of these images were composed of elements of good lighting, little or no motion blur, and a sharp focus on the subject.

The rest of the images that we took here were either blurred, out of focus, overexposed, or just didn’t work out in some form.

A large sum of these photographs didn’t fit the criteria for this experiment, or lacked good composition.

Photogames – Shutter speed (Balls)

We then threw three balls into the air and tried to capture images of them in different shapes in mid-air, the best photographs resulting in the shape of a (nearly) straight line and a triangle.