Since nothing is actually moving in a photograph, motion is revealed in photography through blur. Blur, often confused with out of focus, is created by a shutter speed that is not a fast enough segment of time to freeze what is moving.
Both motion blur and stillness, are best shown in contrast to one another. Complete stillness in an image can seem too static, complete motion blur can make an image visually unintelligible.
Let’s start conceptualizing motion blur, as the camera sees it, with an analogy that recalls three fairly common experiences.
When “regular” lights are on, we see motion because light is constantly revealing it. Our eyes update our brains in real time. Consider the child’s popular interactive drawing activity – the humble flip book.
A flip book, I’m sure you know, is made up of individually still drawings. The action of flipping from one page with a slightly different drawing to the next gives the illusion of motion. Without the flip, each page and drawing is as static, or still, as static gets.
Flip books are the most basic form of animation. Animation and modern films are my second example. In the beginning, like the flip book, every frame was meticulously drawn by hand. Similarly, if you pause your Blu-Ray player you’ll stop the motion and see just one frame, one “slice” of time.
These are decent examples, but they are not occurring in real time, and aren’t exactly what the still camera sees, as it sees it.
The last example is for the clubbin’ crowd. A basic strobe light is actually a fairly comprehensive way of describing how a camera’s shutter speed works.
When a light strobes, even when a person is moving rapidly, your brain receives freeze-frames of them and they appear still. This is what the camera sees when the shutter speed is fast because it opens and closes nearly instantaneously. Each flash of the strobe would be an example of light hitting your sensor while the shutter is open, because the sensor of the camera is completely dark if the shutter is closed, like the inside of the camera obscura.
Conversely, with a long, or slow shutter speed, the shutter remains open and light, like it does in our “regular” lighting conditions, continues to hit the sensor like it does our eye. The main difference is that our eyes do not record light like the sensor does. So if the light is still hitting the sensor, it is still recording. Therefore, if a subject in a photo is moving, it is recorded as being in more than one place during that time of open shutter, and it appears as blur – which is an accurate representation of where it was in that slice of real time – in both (all) places.
Consider the image above of the waterfall and notice that the water looks silky. This is because of a slow shutter speed; the water continued to move over the falls as the shutter remained open. The places where the water was most constantly white appear more white. In the places it was only present intermittently, what was constant for the time it was absent shows through from behind it. This is seen at the edge of the falls in the hard edge of the dark rocks. The rocks were not moving, so they continued to be recorded by the sensor when the water was thin. In the places where the water never ceased to be, over the falls, we see no rock. Surely, we would see rock there if this river were dried up.
Blur occurs when the camera is still and the subject is moving, but it also occurs when the camera is moving, even if the subject is still; remember that photography is all about perception. Maybe you’ve taken a photo with a shutter speed that is too slow to be hand-holding and the whole thing came out blurry, I know I have. Several hundred, probably.
Controlling blur is fascinating to the eye because it’s a very “goldilocks” element to incorporate into your images: too much or too little can render it ineffective.
One technique to use when a subject is moving is called panning, and it can be particularly gripping. Panning means moving your camera at the same rate of your moving subject. If your camera is recording your subject moving, but it doesn’t move in your frame because you’re essentially keeping it in the same place while moving with it, everything that is not moving in real time (the background) will appear in blur because you moved your camera, giving that the illusion of motion. That may be a challenge to visualize if you don’t have a lot of experience with it, hopefully thinking of it this way will help. If a tree (obviously not moving) is in the right side of your frame, and you move your camera right, it will eventually be in the left side of your frame because it has stayed constant. It’d be the same as facing a wall and then turning 90 degrees to your right. The wall would then be on your left because it has not moved. This is how panning blurs the still and freezes the moving. Try it out, it’s much easier to visualize than it is to explain, so I’ll drop an image below to showcase the panning technique.
Briefly recall the post on contrast. This is another way to add contrast to an image; stillness and motion pack the most punch when they are used together. The choice that a photographer makes about what to blur makes all the difference to the message it sends. Imagine the photo above with blurry riders and a sharp background; the subject of the image would be totally different. Imagine it again with nothing in blur, which is how this shot would appear without the intentionally slow shutter speed; it would look much more like a casual snapshot which doesn’t visually impress quite as much.
Using blur creatively definitely takes some forethought, but the mixture of moving and static elements in an image can do wonders for conveying a sense of atmosphere.
POINT OF VIEW can also have a very strong impact on how visually compelling an image is.
Though probably the most basic of concepts on this site, it can be a powerful tool to add interest to a photo. For as easy as it is to change, point of view has the ability to get a viewer thinking outside the box and looking at something familiar in a new and interesting way.
Our eyes see from our height all day long. Naturally, some of us are taller than others, but after childhood, the height our eyes are doesn’t change much from year to year. As a result, we grow accustomed to a point of view that is generally somewhere between five and six feet off the ground. The effect this has on photography is a negative one if we don’t change it.
Interest is built through point of view by extremes. Seen above, the bottom side of a growing flower is not something we see frequently. We simply do not spend time this close to the ground.
Consider the assumption that I am making while viewing this photograph. It is completely plausible that this flower has been taken out of context, plucked out of the ground and held up in front of a camera of a photographer at their regular eye level. Distance is hard to gauge while staring at the sky, this may be a very apt choice on the photographer’s part.
Photography has a certain power within because we generally ascribe to the “seeing is believing” principle and we don’t always ask questions once we see. Truth is, this flower may well have been taken at a generic point of view, but if it has, the photographer has still composed the image so it gives the illusion of being near to the ground. Even the illusion of point of view has changed, and we believe it right off the bat because of our preconceptions that flowers are always near to the ground.
In the image below, the camera has been lowered to be more true to what a child sees. It is the variety, the break from our “normal” visual experience that empowers images. This, in general, is very consistent with why I love photography so much – the magic lies in what it makes us do, how it makes us see differently and broaden our vision that is often too narrow, too monotonous, too stagnant. It is similar to the old proverb about walking a mile in another man’s shoes, it builds empathy.
The tricky part about getting a viewer to appreciate a changed point of view is that the photographer must first train himself to look for other points of view and have the awareness to capture them “in the wild,” meaning as they happen in real time.
The last point of view would be from up high, or even directly above, and is often called the “bird’s eye view.”
The bird’s eye view has a certain energy to it. You get this perspective while standing on top of a tall building, at the top of a roller coaster ride, or looking out an airplane window. Humanity has an innate sense of desire for things upward. Call it spiritual, if you like. At one point in time, flight was the ultimate achievement. Following that, space (flying, only higher) became the race we were in. We still stare at the stars and wonder at the depth of it all. The energy of the bird’s eye view can deliver a certain sense of wonder, or excitement, or maybe even fear if it gives off a feeling of risk.
The key is the abnormality of the point of view. The more outlandish, the more eye-catching it can be, but this is not a catch-all technique, and it does not mean that all photos taken from ye- olde-eye-level are uninteresting by default. The other rules of composition are still viable from every point of view, and an extreme point of view is not required for a viewer to be gripped by an image.
As with everything, once more, add it in the bag of tricks. There will be a time when you need to spice up an image and changing point of view will be just what the doctor ordered, there are times when it would be inappropriate. Being well rounded in your understanding of your options is what will give you the ability to choose what techniques to use and when to use them.
Now check out these tips on Getting POP into your images with practical color theory.
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