Have you already tried to play with motion blur? You sure know there are two very different types of blur in photography:
- “Motion Blur”, coming from a subject moving too fast in regard of the chosen exposure time,
- “Shake”, coming from the photographer moving while holding the camera.
The motion blur will result in a sharp background with some blurry forms where your subject used to be. Beside messing up with scores of underexposed party pictures, this is an effect that can be really interesting for photographers. The shake blur on the other hand is way more annoying because it will mess with the picture as a whole. One way to disminish this unwanted effect is to use a tripod or stabilized lenses / onboard chips that will reduce the unwanted shake and help to some extend prevent this type of blur.
Both types of blur are of course deeply linked to the exposure time and the aperture you will use. The longer the exposure, the more likely you are to get something blurred on your picture. And since the smaller aperture you use, the longer you are to expose…
Today, I’d like to tell you about an experiment I did playing with both blurs at the same time called “filé” in French (if anyone can point out the English name for that… don’t hesitate).
Try taking a picture while quickly moving your camera horizontally ; what you will get is a blured picture displaying some horizontal lines. Now imagine what it would look like if you had a static sharp object in the foreground… yes, the object would appear to be moving, that’s the neat effect of the “filé”.
To achieve this, you must first tweak your camera to expose quite a long time (0.5 -> 1.5s in my tests). Then simply point your camera at the moving object you want to capture and move with it. The whole idea is to take a picture of this moving object while making it appear static to the camera. You achieve this by moving the camera at the same time so that the object stays exactly at the same place (for your camera’s chip) during the whole exposure.
I took something like 50 tram pictures this week… and all the pictures you can see below are the ones that are not totally screwed-up… one tip though; pick yourself an object that come back frequently… not every 5 min like a tram >_<
… so what do you think? Have you already played with this effect? What would you advise in this case?
The english term seems to be “Pan blur“.
My experiments were on some rallye cars. My last try is visible on herisson’s blog.
Nikon passion just released a tutorial about this effect, if you want to take a look.
0.5 sec is a very long exposure for hand-held shots, even to try panning blur. It depends on the distance, angular speed and sometimes rotation of the subject, but I guess it is rather around 1/10 – 1/100 s (I usually pick around 1/60 s for rally cars).
And of course, if you use a stabilisation system, you should check if it detects panning. If not, if it has a specialized mode (IS2 and IS3 on Olympus for example). If not, well, turn it off, since stabilisation is specially design to make photos look as if camera was motionless.
It also depends on the focal you use. Since the general rule to not have some motion blur is an exposure faster than 1/focal length, i guess that the rule to actually create some blur is to have an exposure of more than 1/focal length.
@Ghusse: thanks for the links.
@Herisson: jep, I got confused by the fact that I shot in the dark. By daylight your numbers and Ghusse’s rule of thumb sound indeed correct.