Time Travel

The concept was to show both the upright and fallen Domino tiles in a single capture, without the use of motion blur to connect them.

This became a dance about time: the length of time it took a given number of Domino tiles (in this case six tiles) to fall from upright to flat, how long the shutter remained open to capture the whole event, and how much time after the shutter opened, before the tiles were set in motion.

The black & white colours and the rectangular shape of the Dominos became the design elements for the finished photograph.

After many failed and sometimes hilarious attempts, the following method proved successful.

A Nikon D300 with a 105mm f2.8 lens was mounted on a tripod. Shooting in RAW format, the exposure was set at 2.0 sec,  f/22,  ISO 200. Natural light came from a single window.

The aperture was stopped down to just before the point of diffraction for the 105mm lens. And the ISO was set low to provide the optimal shutter speed for capturing all of the ‘action’, without overexposing the image. A split second of open shutter was required before the tiles were triggered to collapse and after they came to rest, thus capturing both ends of the event with reasonable focus. 

Post capture editing was minimal. The limited colour palette was converted to B&W in Lightroom, the contrast was adjusted to hide the reflected light that bounced off the background cloths, and final cropping created the finished composition.