How to: in-camera motion blur part 2 by Charlie Watkins

I was thinking about this the other day and some comments on my other in-camera motion blur ‘how to’ has spurred me on.

So, to start – I need to share the golden rule with shutter speeds for everyday normal handheld photography. In general if you want to get a sharp shot handheld, you need to have a shutter speed of at least the same as the focal length of your lens.

i.e. using a 50mm lens, you need 1/50th second to be able to hand hold a sharp shot. If you are using 18mm, then you need 1/18th sec (1/15-1/20 as there isn’t a 1/8th on cameras I don’t think). Significantly, if you are using a zoom, 200mm needs 1/200th sec. Many people find they need faster shutters as they are shaky – I can get down to 1/20th on my 50mm as I seem to have a steady hand. The camera on auto mode will try to do this for you by fiddling about with aperture and ISO to maintain this balance.

But as we’re creative types, we tell the camera what to do, not the other way around, don’t we? And as we’re in control and setting our own apertures and ISO’s – it pays to remember that rule so we don’t stuff up by accident!

Anyways, I’ll come back to this.

So – the other kind of motion blurring is where you keep a moving subject in sharp focus but use a slow shutter speed and panning action to blur the background to improve the shot.

This is used most in motorsport to do two things:

1. separate the subject from the background
2. to impart the feeling of movement into the shot.

Typically, when you want to take pictures of fast moving things like small children and cars whizzing past, its helpful to use a fast shutter speed to try to freeze the action. This is great advice and works very well a lot of the time but can leave shots feeling a little, well, static. Life’s not really like that, so thats where this technique can sometimes work well if the shots you are taking are leaving you feeling a little underwhelmed.

Lets use kitesurfers as an example, mostly because I have some shots of them I can use, but this works for motorsport or running children too. Kitesurfers blast along at a hell of a pace in a stiff breeze, but static is one thing they are not – so freezing the action as they are going hell for leather doesn’t really feel right – its fine for when they are in the air, but not blasting along the water.

See? Fast shutter doesn’t really hit the spot.

Nice enough shot, but there’s something missing – a sense of motion!

So what we do here is deliberately set a slow shutter speed using our golden rule from earlier. Say you’re using a 50mm lens, set the camera to shutter priority mode and select 1/50th of a second shutter speed as a starting point. You might find that there is too much light for this and the camera can’t stop the aperture down enough to handle the shutter being open for that long – make sure you’re ISO is as low as it can go and any auto ISO settings are turned off. If you still don’t have enough headroom for the light, you’ll either have to wait a little until the light has dropped, use a neutral density filter to darken the scene or raise the shutter speed a bit.

But lets assume its 5pm in spring or autumn or its slightly overcast and the light is perfect. So, having set the shutter to 1/50th second, select the centre focal point only for autofocus if you camera has it and also set the focus to continuous focus (C mode on some camera bodies) so that the camera will adjust the focus constantly rather than giving that little ‘beep’ for single focus that we normally use. This is so we can track our subject and keep them in focus as they move across the shot. Static focus will only work for the one point where it first locked on.

Then, looking at our kitesurfer, we don’t do anything else except pan with him has he (or her, we have loads of girls here that mix it with the best of them on the water) zooms past. Practice keeping the surfer right in the middle of the viewfinder as they go past – the faster or closer they are the better. You’ll need to get the speed exactly right to pull this off, so do lots of dry runs to get the feel for it. Imagine manning an AA gun trying to shoot down a plane – following the subject smoothly at exactly the same speed. Breathing is important here, as is a secure footing.

Once you’re confident, start shooting – pan with the subject, shoot and keep panning – smooth as butter.

When you get it just right – the subject will be sharp (as you’ve used the golden rule for shutter speed) but the background is going to be blurry (as you’re moving the camera with a slow-ish shutter)

What you get is this

see the same effect on the water as the motion pans from my other shots – but see how the surfer is in sharp focus. If you are very confident and steady handed, drop the shutter speed a bit more – try 100th of a second for a 200mm telephoto lens – you’ll get even more awesome motion blur, but you’ll have to work harder at the panning technique to keep the subject sharp and movement free

Try it on anything thats moving past you – I just googled some shots – how about this for an example – there’s loads more feel in this shot than you can get with a static one.

Now, imagine what else you could do this with – point the camera at yourself at arms length, now, spin around when taking the shot. Use a longer shutter speed if you need to get more motion, but not so low that you go blurry too.

Check out Ebbers hammock shot – 1/10th of a second apparently – looks awesome – not panning, but using slow shutter to pick up and enhance the motion.

There are loads of application for this, not just for panning a moving subject, although thats very common application.

Don’t be afraid to experiment with shutter speed, tell the camera what you want it to do, make it work for you. There’s a whole world of creativity out there, this is only the tip of the iceberg.

Have fun with it!!