Learning verses Mastering

 As a tutor, it is something that is very close to my heart as I teach I have two jobs to pass on knowledge and also to inspire people. A lot of people do not understand the difference between learning and mastering your subject.

I have found that a lot of the time getting the right settings are not about lots of fancy settings but it about working with one of the few basic settings like exposures or focusing system.

Mastering a subject has two benefits, the first part is that it will become second nature and the second is that you can use it in different ways.

Second nature

There are lots of things that you a photographer has to work with and balance so the more things that you master them they will be second nature for you. One less thing to worry about means more time on being creative.

Being creative

Some settings have more than creative options than others but until you investigate them then you will not know the full extent of what they do. I can talk about it in different ways but of showing this but the simplest is to take something that a lot of photographers learn but not master, this is shutter speed.

On the most basic level shutter speed controls how movement looks in the photographs and it something that is worth making second nature as it used a lot. Just knowing the effect that it will have on your photograph and how after you need to go freeze action is only part of the equations.

A lot of photographer knows 3 shutter speed tricks freeze, blur, and pan shots. For me there are 3 other levitation, ghost and time warp. Levitation is not truly a shutter speed trick but more one of psychology than photography but the other two are to do with mastery of shutter speed.

Time Warp

I know bending time is not possible but again with some understanding of psychology and photography. We are used to seeing things frozen or blurred in photographs we create an idea of what was happening.

I hope by looking at the photo the trick is obvious, that the subject that is stuck in time is not moving when everyone around her is. As per normal it is a balancing act to get the correct shutter speed to for the effect, this one is a 1/4s.

Ghost photo

This covers the of the shutter speed effects in one. With the background not moving it fully solid in the shot. I am here for a percentage of the time so that I show transparent as the camera records me and the background in the same shot. Last of all is the fact that if something blurs too much it will vanish and that allows me to move out of the shot without being showing in the photo.

Question for the comments

As well as shutter speed if you use aperture to blur something enough it will vanish what can you use this for? Hint it is extremely hard to blur things enough.