Dad's Windmill Spinning In The Breeze

Some time ago my brother Glen snapped a great photo of our dad's windmill as it spun wildly on a snowy winter day. I really liked it so I put it up and wrote a little article about how dad loved to build and watch whirligigs. I received many wonderful comments about that picture and I thank Glen for allowing me to use it.

Well, a couple of days ago we were helping mom trim a hedge in her yard when I decided to take a few pictures of dad's windmill of my own. As usual, I had the camera in "Automatic" mode and the bright sunlight resulted in a super-fast shutter speed which "stopped the action" and made the windmill look like it wasn't spinning. Knowing how dad loved to see his whirligigs in action, I decided to place the camera in manual mode and set it to use a slower shutter speed in an effort to capture an image that showed the blades spinning.

I started off with a shutter speed of 1/250 of a second and the blades still looked more or less motionless. I gradually slowed the shutter speed more and more taking a test picture at each interval, and in each resulting image the windmill's blades appeared to spin faster than in the previous picture. I finally ended up with a shutter speed of 1/10 of a second, and as you can see in today's picture the blades are spinning in all their glory...just like dad would like it!

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