I didn’t find the answer, though the wind was sure blowing, my friend. I decided to take advantage of the blustery winds today to stop action and blur action. It was not easy and I have to admit I took probably 300 or more photos and was disappointed in all of them.
I have a colorful fabric wind spiral designed to twist in the wind. It has a little wooden ball on the bottom for balance, I suppose. It didn’t seem to help in 22 mph winds, with gusts even higher. I hung the twister on a shepherd’s hook that I pushed down into the grass so that the twister had sun on it. I used a slow shutter speed to blur the twister. I discovered that the auto focus couldn’t key on anything because everything was moving in the wind. When it finally dawned on me to focus on a tree trunk, I realized that the step ladder on whose top step my gorilla pod was perched, was not stable and although I leaned my weight onto it, there was still a wobble. When I realized most of the photos were unusable, the sun had shifted. I moved the still unstable step ladder and the shepherd’s hook with the spiral hanging from it to a sunny place in the yard and started again, with only slightly better results. I still had trouble finding anything to focus on; when I realized the fence was still, my step ladder was not. I need a reliable tripod!
Here are the results. The first is the blurred motion; the second, the stopped motion. The little wooden ball shows in each photo.
Lens @ 170mm
ISO 100
f/16
1/4
Exposure decreased by 1; black point increased slightly
Lens @ 200mm
ISO 100
f/5.6
1/640
SOOC