Auswanderer Quatsch

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?

I had the opportunity to play with a Canon 450D last weekend, and furthermore play the comparison game… oh god, why didn’t I stare at the aquarium while eating chocolate instead? >_<

Photography has been a recurrent discussion subject for “PhD-J.” and I since I bought my Pentax K100D 2.5 years ago. After hesitating for a long time, a trip to Asia helped his decision process and he bought himself a Canon 450D with two additional objectives: a wide angle (11-16mm) and teleobjective (75-250mm?). So he let me play with his camera last weekend and after I complained about the Canon handling that I still find messier and less intuitive than the Pentax’s, he told me that all he was disapointed about, was the noise level of the pictures. So we decided to do a little comparison test.

The results are… well… scary… at best. Even at 200 ISO (minimum sensibility for the K100D), the noise of the Pentax is just overwhelming. I cannot really certify that, but I am pretty sure that the 1600 ISO on the 450D looked better than 200 ISO on the Pentax, which I find astonishing since three years ago, when the K100D came out, it was actually in the norm for entry level cameras. I was really hit behind the head by the technical improvements of the last years…  and you can easily imagine the issue I am now facing: I want to gear up too dammit! But it’s not so simple…

Pentax is in a really strange state right now. The K10 and K100 were really great cameras in 2006 with really high return on investment. Instead of releasing real successors, Pentax produced the K20 and K200 in 2008 which were in fact polished versions of the older ones and were well… relatively disappointing (meaning that upgrading from K10 to K20 was seen by most as not worth it). Since then Pentax only produced the KM Camera, an entry model and (if I am not mistaken) nothing on the high end of the spectrum.

That would not be a problem if Canon and Nikon (and Sony) were not there. But they are here and pulling-up the technology hard and fast with professional level gear at an incredible tempo (about  two new cameras per year?). So Pentax products are ageing fast and I am now in a difficult position: wait and see (and maybe be disappointed in one year) or leave right now, sell what can be sold and start from scratch… I must admit, I am more and more tempted by the Pentaxidermy.

As always, I’ll start gathering info while letting time do its deed. Maybe the post-christmas/new year’s second-hand market will have its say in this… or some early 2010 announcements from Pentax… who knows.

Geometry behind bars is one of the first picture i took in France during the summer vacations (near Granville, 15km away from the Mt St Michel).