Creating Art out of E
Motion
xpressing motion by blurring moving subjects in still photographs is a technique everyone is familiar with. I want to revisit this creative idea and share with you the camera settings I use and my own approach. As much as I love tack sharp images, there is a place for this kind of artistic interpretation of motion. There are two ways to photograph moving subjects to create blurs. You can pan with the subjects as I did with the roseate spoonbills, below,
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and the 1950’s Buick convertible captured in Cuba on the next page. Or, you can mount the camera on a tripod and let the subject blur as it moves while the background remains sharp. That’s what I did in photographing the Canada lynx at the bottom of the next page. Both techniques entail using slow shutter speeds. The question is, how slow should the shutter be to create an artistic image? The answer takes a little bit of thought. The factors that come into play are:
