I was once sitting in a fairly large hall listening to a photographer talk, when the speaker shouted, “Sharpness is king !” It really got my attention. It also got under my skin when it became clear he was suggesting that at no time should any kind of blurring be allowed—other than from a “cascading waterfall.” Needless to say, I would not be too popular in this man’s photographic circle. I wrote a whole book about shutter speed, much of it dedicated to the idea of motion.

I still recall with great fondness an accidental image I shot years ago while visiting New York City for the first time. I was in Times Square and I accidentally tripped the shutter release on my Nikkormat FTn camera, which just happened to have the shutter speed set at 1/2 sec. Since this was during the era of film, I did not see the result of this mistake for several days. In fact, I forgot all about it, and not until I returned home and began editing the twenty-plus rolls of processed slide film did I stumble across that mistake and immediately exclaimed, “Wow!” Since that memorable day, I have made it a point to experiment with slow shutter speeds. Many of my experiments have been miserable failures, but as the saying goes, each failure has also brought me that much closer to success.