Creative Shots - Blurred Motion

Sam was jumping on my bed this morning and wanted me to take a picture of him flying like Superman. The result?


The boys love these types of pictures where it looks like they are moving quickly. I do, too, so we have tried different techniques to see what works.

In the picture of SuperSam, I set the camera on a slow shutter speed (1/20 of a second) with the flash on. The flash provided the light to illuminate Sam, and the slow shutter speed provided the light for the background, which blurred as I moved the camera. This is called motion blur. The slow shutter is also the reason the window can be seen through Sam's arm -- after he "flew" out of the way, the light from the window came through where his arm used to be.

Using the flash to "freeze" the subject while moving the camera to provide the blur also works well on moving people outside. In the following pictures of Sam and Boyd from last year, I used the flash plus slow shutter technique in the evening.



If you cannot manually set the shutter speed on your camera, or if you do not know how to do that, do not worry. Most (all?) point-and-shoot cameras with a built in flash have a flash mode called "slow-synch" (or "nightshot" or "monument" or something similar) that will automatically fire the flash with a slow shutter. (This flash mode also works well for taking pictures in front of monuments at night or at other places where you need both the flash to light up the people in front and enough time to record the dimmer lights in the background.)

When creating motion blur, it is very helpful to track the moving people with the camera to minimize the amount of ghosting caused by the long exposure. If you are good at tracking people with your camera as they move -- or, really, whatever subject you are shooting -- and have a little more light available than twilight, you can even get decent motion blur without using a flash. I am not very good at tracking, so I have to take a lot of these shots to get some that are not a blurry mess! The following are Sam and Boyd an overcast fall day a few weeks back.



They are not great, but they do demonstrate motion blur without a flash. One of Blanche's relatives -- someone who is much better at tracking than I am -- took the following picture of a girl pushing her uncle on a skateboard. I wish I could take pictures this good!


This picture is also great because the photographer got low and close to their subject, which was the topic of a previous creative shots post.

Play around with your flash modes, practice your tracking, take lots of pictures (hey, it's digital, so it's not like you have to keep the bad ones!), and if you get anything good that you would like to share, send them to GAP!

TIP: Find out what the different modes on your camera can do. They are there for a reason!

UPDATE

We were remiss to not point out yesterday that Susan posted on her blog a different flash technique for capturing the motion of falling snow. However, we are concerned for the environment that she may burn through a lot of batter recharges trying to capture, as she points out in the comments,"an individual snowflake and a blurred background." Good luck, Susan, and send that picture our when you get it!