Excercise: Shutter speeds

This exercise demonstrates how movement and shutter speed are related, the longer the shutter is open, the more movement will be captured.
A series of pictures from a fixed point were taken, from a very fast shutter speed to a slow one.
For this exercise I decided to photograph water movement, not something that I have done before but looking forward to the challenge. First problem was to find some fast moving water in Northampton not easy as the River Nene tends to meander gently through the county!!, eventually I found a weir and sluice feeding in to a local canoe club and decided it was about as good as it would get.
I have included five photographs from a set of 12 taken to show the results

  Photograph 1  1/1000  F5.6
  The very fast shutter speed has frozen the water movement.

Photograph 2  1/125  F11
At 1/125 there is a movement effect in some areas of the photograph, faster moving parts of the water are blurring.

                                                   
Photograph 3  1/30  Ff18
At 1/30 the slower shutter speed is beginning to take more effect, all of the moving parts of the scene are flowing.

Photograph 4  1/6 F32
At 1/6 the water is changing appearance, larger areas of blurring are appearing and the effect of movement is apparent.

Photograph 5  1sec  F36
At 1 second the water flow now looks softer and flow is accentuated. Exposure is difficult to control.

                                                                                                                                      

This has been an enjoyable exercise, as I mentioned above I decided to go with water movement as I had not tried it before and I am  pleased with the results. Of the 5 shots my favourites are 4 and 5, I like the effect of blurring the water to make it look soft and slightly ethereal, it seems to enhance a less then dramatic scene.
I encountered a few problems with over exposure with the really slow speeds, even with a -2 exposure compensation set on my camera the picture was over exposed, I was shooting in shutter priority mode and the Fstop was at 36 so I knew I could not compensate for this with a change in aperture, this is something I intend to explore and overcome.