It is strange how often as technology evolves, it tends to be derided, even demonised at times. To this day, there are still people who use only film claiming that digital simply looks fake (now don’t get me wrong, I think film is terrific, but so is digital, the fact that you choose one over the other doesn’t make the other worthless). Others make fun of “chimping” on a camera LCD, or for any photoshop work. The fact is, while technology can be used to produce a lot of crap, it is undeniable that it opens up creative avenues that you couldn’t ever dream of before. In fact I truly believe that we are in an age where the only limit to creativity is our brain.  Now, it wasn’t my intention to go on over this, but I just read a really cool post by Jay Goodrich on Darwin Wiggett’s blog (see it here), so my thinking is a bit tainted.

All I really wanted to say was that the shot above couldn’t have been done only a couple of years back, and now I routinely have fun with this technique to create some abstracts. As you have probably guessed, the shot represents light bouncing over ripples in the water. To get this look, you have to be able to freeze motion at about 1/125s, but you also have to have a fair amount of depth of field, f/11 at a minimum, f/16 or above is preferable. The only problem, is that to get these colours, you have to do this at sunset, where the light levels aren’t nearly that high. A few years back, I couldn’t really push my Nikon  D200 past iso400, 800 if I was pushing my luck. Today, I crank my D700 up to 3200 without even thinking about it and have taken more than decent shots in almost complete darkness at iso 6400! For this shot, I needed to get up to iso 3200 to get the shutter speed I needed, and I didn’t hesitate.

There you go, embrace technology, unleash your creativity!