Auswanderer Quatsch

We reached +10°C this afternoon, which is 20° more than when I came back in Germany after the Xmas break. Still it is so sudden that the snow did not have time to properly melt… yet…

And then the hand of God came out of the cloud and slapped its creature hard in the face (*)

* any reference to B&W from Lionhead would be pure coincidence…

Thanks to the visit of a Canadian friend of MlleV this weekend, I set foot for the first time in the “BMW Welt” (“welt” means “world”) in Munich. This is not really a museum, more like an exhibit of some of the models they have, a lot of explanation about the “hybrid technology” created by BMW and a lot of technical explanations about the BMW cars in general.

Actually, we wanted to attend to the tour of the factory and visit the Museum, but all the tours were more than overbooked on that day and the museum was closed! Bad choice… but still… what do you have to say to that?

Here we go again with another strange night shot from my now very-well-known bus stop. I had 10 minutes to spare, so I did some manual shooting again. This one was not really 10 minutes long but a 25 seconds exposure at f/8.0.

I particularly like the red lines going out on the right side, it somehow breaks the monotony/parallelism of the whole picture…

Yeah… not much more to say…

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?