Capturing the blur of movement is one of the most important tools in your Photography Toolkit. So I set out capture movement in three different ways in this Photography Toolkit Challenge. You will need to understand the aperture and shutter speed of you camera and how to adjust them to capture the blur.
We have already explored three ways of capturing the blur of movement in an image: panning with your subject, staying still as your subject moves through the frame, and moving through the frame as a photographer.
Understanding how and when to use these skills will make you a better photographer. When I see someone who has captured the blur of movement, I know that that photographer has control of their camera and knows that they are doing.
Images the show movement as a blur are much harder than ones that freeze the action. Even if you do everything right, there is the element of chance that the image may not work out.
When you look at images of an important event like the Olympics, you will notice that there are a number of these images that show blur and they are fantastic. But when you look at the details of the images that have motion blur, they are often captured from the preliminary early races. Photographers need to make sure that they get images from the final and if they take a chance with a blurred image and it doesn’t work out, then they won’t get another shot.
In terms of settings for my camera, I put my camera in shutter priority mode and allow the camera to select the aperture. The shutter speed is the most important factor in my image so that is what I want to control.
Different objects move at different speeds and you can’t just use one shutter speed. I often suggest that you start at 1/15th of a second and adjust from there. With practice I can recognize the speed of objects and adjust the shutter speed of my first shot because sometimes I only get one chance to capture the shot. If you are just starting out learning about capturing the blur of movement, try to find a place that has regular flow of movement so you can try again and again.
I often am using a wider angle lens because any it is more forgiving when panning with a subject that a telephoto lens. For this challenge, I used the Nikon 17-35mm F2.8 and the 24-70mm F2.8 lenses.
I always set my camera to its fastest frame advance mode so I can fire off a number of frames quickly. This definitely helps me to have more images that are ‘keepers’.
I didn’t use a tripod as I wanted to be quite mobile as I was moving around. However, a tripod can definitely be a very useful tool especially when staying still and allowing things to move through the frame.
Check out the video of the movement challenge.
Here are some of the images from the challenge
Thanks for all your support. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
