Day 29 - The Ghost and the Machine

My long flight delays this week had at least one beneficial effect: they gave me time to figure out the manual settings on the camera.

So now I've discovered not only how to adjust both the aperture and shutter speed, I've also found out that our little Olympus has some fantastically long shutter settings. Up to fifteen seconds, in fact.

That allows me to set the camera, touch the shutter release and then, while the camera is focusing the shot, move away from it and into the frame. Unlike the "bulb" setting, which keeps the shutter open for as long as you hold down the release button, the 15-second setting works without me having to be in contact with the camera, so no shake is transferred from my hand to the image. This means that the fixed objects in the image (like the stove) remain crisply focused despite the long shutter opening.

I love this setting. It allowed me to create this interesting shot of my ghost making spaghetti. It also allowed me to take a shot (lower picture) of my portable DVD player while it was showing a movie, thus creating a neat collage of images from the movie itself (Stephen King's The Stand). The only trick is to make sure you don't have too much light. In this case, I closed the aperture right down and then turned off most of the lights in the kitchen to ensure the photos weren't overexposed.