Fountain Kiss, Bicentennial Park

I was working on my last photo of the day for the “Picture Today, Inspire Tomorrow” project on May 15 at ADAY.org (more info here). When I planned my day, I wanted to end up at the fountain at the new Bicentennial Park in Columbus, Ohio. It is a great place to take pictures. As I visualized the image ahead of time, children would be playing at the fountain, creating blurry silhouettes.  I already have a “children in the fountain” photo in my files, but all photos had to be taken on May 15.

As I visualized the image ahead of time, children would be playing in the fountain, creating blurry silhouettes.  I already have “children in the fountain” photos in my files, but all photos for the project had to be taken on May 15.

When I finished my prior shoot, I hurried to the fountain. Unfortunately, everyone had already left the fountain or were in the process of leaving. Fortunately a couple came along, stood in front of the fountain and kissed. They were standing too close together to get separate silhouettes, so I asked them if they would mind kissing again, but stand a little bit apart. They didn’t mind! The photo was taken at 9:33 pm EDT.

I showed them photos, thanked them, and gave them my business card.

The exposure for the photo was based on the brightest, misty part of the fountain. I added about 1 1/2 stops of “plus” exposure compensation to what the camera meter said to keep the fountain light and bright.

I wanted a shutter speed long enough to blur the fountain, but not blur the couple too much. An aperture of f/11 gave me a shutter speed of 1.3 seconds (when you figure in the exposure compensation), long enough to do what I wanted. With a shutter speed that long, the camera had to be on a tripod.

I didn’t worry about the white balance setting on my camera and adjusted the RAW file after the fact using Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) on my computer. I deliberately added just a bit of “warmth” to the water. If I was shooting jpeg files, I would have set the white balance to tungsten to match the light source under the fountain.

Photo Data: Canon 5D. Canon EF 17-40mm f/4 lens at 40mm. f/11, 1.3 seconds, ISO 100.

Links

You can learn more about exposure compensation, white balance, blurring water, RAW vs jpeg files, and exposure (using apertures, shutters speeds and ISO settings) in my book, Digital Photography Exposure for Dummies. You can learn about the book here, and buy it at Amazon.com.

There is set of articles on exposure and exposure compensation at my photo web site. Go to “Exposure 101”.

My portfolio of 10 photos at ADAY.org.

Learn more about “Picture Today, Inspire Tomorrow” at ADAY.org.