I took a photograph of my watch just to see what would happen, I left the shutter open for a minute and got a picture totaly different to what I had expected. I would have thought that one would have been able to track the second hand all the way around the face but in fact it totaly vanished as if was not even there. Why was there no trace of it in the picture? what happened?
Because when you leave the shutter open, the image that appears MOST is what dominates. For example, if you were to take a ten-second shot of a piece of white paper, and a fly was in the shot for one second, it most likely wouldn’t show up.
In essence, each position on your watch is one part minute hand, and 59 parts watch face.
Thanks Spoofe that’s great! Live and learn.
If you use a fast enough film, you will get an image of the second hand. It will just be a smear around the watchface, but it will be there. You’d also have to make sure you don’t overexpose the rest of the image. It’d be a lot of work to get a picture of a streeky second hand and a blurry minute hand, but if you have a lot of (unintentional pun warning) times on your hands, knock yourself out.
If the film is too fast (the number on the film box, 200 speed film is “faster” than 100 speed film) or you have too much light, you’ll overexpose.
If the film is too slow, or the light is too low you’ll underexpose.
If you balance everything just right, you could get a pretty cool picture. (“Cool” of course is highly relative. Photo geeks would like it, regular people would say “Huh, a watch.”) Especially if you don’t expose for the whole minute. “The Passage of Time” by: Just Wondering.
-Rue.