Capturing the Wind

© Dan Hucko

My wife and I drove up to visit our families this weekend for Mother's day. Living in upstate New York means that snow in May is not outside the realm of possibility, and we had a big cold front blow through with tree-damaging winds and flurries all weekend. When we got to my parents, we were talking about the crazy weather on the drive up, and my dad said "I tried to capture the wind with my camera this afternoon, I'll post some photos tomorrow."

That struck me as a rather profound statement. Photography is inherently a two-dimensional art form: the end result is a static image on a screen or a page, frozen forever and incapable of moving. So how do you capture something like the wind, which we understand by the motion that it creates in leaves, flags, water, clouds, etc? My dad's answer was to crank down the aperture and lengthen the shutter speed, with some rather interesting results. Not all trees move the same in the wind, and the photos have some great texture and layers to them. The most interesting part to me was the shapes that got etched into the sky around the edges of the moving trees.

I encourage you to spend some time looking at his photos and think about how you can use shutter speed to capture movement or time in your photos. Or think about the opposite - how a short shutter speed or a flash can freeze something in time that we can't usually stop and examine. Use the limitations of the medium to your advantage and give your viewers a peek into a world that they just can't normally see.

See the full set here

~S

[title of blog] on flickr