Movement and Energy

About two months ago, I discovered a local photography magazine, PhotoVideoi. The magazine has a monthly photography contest in which the winning photograph and the top seven or so honorable mentions are published in the magazine (and also entered in the "Photographer of the Year" contest). This past month's contest was on the theme "Movement and Energy."

I found this a somewhat difficult theme to select a photograph for. On the one hand, photography as an artistic medium doesn't work very well (IMO) to show movement or energy, seeing how we're dealing with images taken in a fraction of a second. On the other hand, many people use a blurring effect to create movement and energy in their photos and I, generally speaking, don't like blurry photos. So I chose the opposite tact, taking a recent photo where I had used a very fast shutter speed; in the above photo, the shutter speed was 1/250th of a second (the fastest speed I could manage while using my flash).

Here, of course, the water is falling from the fountain, at first as part of the sheet of water, then releasing to be captured in mid-air, falling as individual droplets or as clumps. I find this photograph creates an emotional tension in me: I want to see the water fall, can visualize it falling but, of course, it just hangs there, forever frozen in the image.

Of the other photos that are in this month's contest, I also like some of the other water images, Andrew JK Tan's "Wakeboarder" and Sahari Sariman's "Splashing," both of whom used the same technique as me. Of the "blurry" photos, Wee Keng Hor's "Porter" is good; I also like Suhaimi Abdullah's black-and-white photo of the fire handler.

To vote for the contest, you have to sign up for HardwareZone's forum. Be sure to vote for #6 before 5:59 pm (Singapore time) on October 28th! ;)