Ten Seconds as a restriction

weekly exercises

4 Aug

There are some magical numbers around when it comes to exposures. They are honestly probably arbitrary, but like many other things they can serve as great starting points for experimentation and play.

One such number is ten seconds. Shirley Steel gave this one to me on the Abstract Workshop. There were others, so stay tuned and we will get to them too.

For this exercise, your goal is to go out and create new photographs. Yes, new ones. Delving into your collection and using the metadata option in Lightroom and adding shutter speed to find all of your existing ten second photographs is cheating. Photograph with intent. Go play with the exercise and learn as much as you can from it.

These new photographs are ten seconds in exposure length. Now I can just create some with some moving water or objects and get some lovely results.

What I will be doing is adding a neutral density filter, probably a ten stop, and painting with my camera set at ten seconds to see what abstract photographs I can do.

When I say painting with my camera, I mean I will be moving it around during the exposure and adding elements of tone and colour to the exposure.

So, for this exercise, the restriction is simple. See what you can do with a ten second exposure. Post your results and discuss.

The question we are discussing, is:

“Are restrictions good for our creativity?”