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Electric Turbine Windmills are common in certain parts of the Pacific Northwest. They're huge and impressive in person. It's tricky to capture the feeling on film, especially the motion.
Here's a normal photo of them windmills. If you're not familiar with them, it doesn't do a good job of conveying how they work. All in all, it's fairly bland.
Should be simple enough, right? Just add some motion blur, and make it look like an airplane propellor!
Pop on an ND filter and do a long exposure, this won't take long...
Cool, a field full of fancy sticks with a bit of blur on the end!
Well, that didn't work quite like I intended... So why not? The blades are moving slowly, and they're thin. So most of the time the blade isn't in the way of the background. The small bit of white it adds simply isn't enough to be clearly visible. or even visible at all for that matter.
The only setting that really matters here was exposure time, and it was 10 seconds.
I decided to try a "short long exposure" Isn't that an oxymoron? Well, yeah, but what I mean is that it's a lot shorter than 10 seconds, but it's still longer than what you would normally shoot. In this case, it was 1/2 second.
This is better, and it does give a feel for the motion. I think with a better (darker) background, this would work.
This is a technique that I read about someplace, can't recall exactly where. It uses the in camera multiple exposure function. I have never used it before, and I may have to experiment with it some more.
I think the resulting photo is cool, and if you're familiar with the windmills, you may enjoy it.
But it doesn't really imply motion, and if you've never seen one, you might just think they had lots of blades.
Bob, this is a cool idea! I agree with Arline that the "short-long" exposure seems best.
It occurs to me that this cries out for something like a second curtain flash technique which would provide you with a streak of moving blades coming up to a sharp blade at the end. I didn't explain that well, but maybe it will make sense… Now I fully realize that you can't do a flash on something like this, but would there be a way to use that principle for a double exposure?
Bob, this is a cool idea! I agree with Arline that the "short-long" exposure seems best.
It occurs to me that this cries out for something like a second curtain flash technique which would provide you with a streak of moving blades coming up to a sharp blade at the end. I didn't explain that well, but maybe it will make sense… Now I fully realize that you can't do a flash on something like this, but would there be a way to use that principle for a double exposure?
Mike, a second curtain flash would give me exactly what I need. As you suggest, it's not possible for something this large, at least without extreme measures.
Double exposure? Could work, if you could line the blades up with luck or skill.
I can envision that it would be a post processing thing. Take a few short-long exposure shots and a few normal exposure shots and blend the two best in post. Tripod is essential, of course, but you're likely on a tripod already. You'd have something pretty cool, I think.
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