Setting Your Shutter for Daytime Fountains

Park
Madrid, Spain

Canon Rebel XT
Focal Length 18mm
Aperture 5.6
Shutter 1/640
ISO 100

This was shot around the time that I got into digital photography and had much to learn.  With that being said I think that this photo turned out pretty good.

A cool effect for this photo would be to use a tripod and enough neutral density filters to be able to slow the shutter down to around 1-2 seconds.  This would give a flowing look to the water, as opposed the grainier feel of this picture.  Here the best think to do would be to set the ISO to 100, or it's lowest possible setting, and set the aperture to F22, or its smallest possible aperture.  Then the only adjustments that you would be able to make would be the shutter speed.  This is when you would need to dim the amount of light coming into the camera.  Neutral density filters are the best way to do this.

For this the shutter was set to 1/640th of a second.  Think of it like this - The shutter will be letting in light to expose the film for only 1/640th of a second.  Anything that moves within this period will be blurred, which would be very hard to do.  You would have to be swinging your camera around when you took the photo.  At this shutter speed you are able to see the individual water droplets in the air.

So if the shutter was open for a full 2 seconds it would be guaranteed that there would be motion blur if you hadn't been using a tripod.

Also I wouldn't have shot directly into the sun.  When this is done the sun basically makes the sky look like overexposed and white.  There will likely also be areas of different exposure needs like the foreground.  This presents problems.  By shooting closer to the end of the day, or earlier to the beginning you will have much more even and subdued lighting, and there should be little or no shadow because of the low trajectory of the sun.