A while back I posted a couple of photos from the Great Ireland Run, including one where I slowed the shutter speed down to imply motion. About 10 seconds after I took that photograph, I took this one, using an even slower shutter speed to really emphasize the movement, but focusing on a runner who happened to be standing still watching the crowd as it walked past.
There are a couple of things in the picture that make it work for me, and a few techniques I employed to make those things work in my favour.
Firstly, as in that previous post, the implied motion is crucial. While I liked the effect I had achieved in the first shot, for this shot I pushed the boundary a little further by slowing the shutter speed right down to 1/8s. The exposure was much the same – a little darker under the shade of some trees – so I had to close down the aperture to it’s narrowest setting. With the speed that people were walking past me, that shutter speed really accentuated the blur of their motion and gives a real sense of movement to the picture.
That sense of movement is nicely contrasted by the very still figure. Compositionally, it really helps here that he is standing alone, and no one else in the frame is anywhere near as still. You might think i had to ask him to hold still for the shot but in fact I had no interaction with him at all – he possibly didn’t even realise I took the photo. The fact is though I only needed him to hold still for 1/8th of a second, which while it is a long time in the sense of a shutter opening and closing, is not really that long when you’re standing still anyway.
If only he was motionless and everything else in the photo was blurred with movement, it might look as if the picture was photoshopped (not that there’s necessarily anything wrong with that), and so the fact that the trees and the advertising hordings are sharp completes the shot nicely and makes it convince as a photograph.
The keep those sharp I had to keep the camera steady for that 1/8th second. Ideally I’d stick the camera on a tripod for that and be done with it, but not on this occasion – the tripod was a half a mile away in the car. So I tried one of my favourite techniques for keeping the camera steady in slow-shutter speed situations. I let it hang down with the camera strap around my neck, steadied my stance a little, put on the self timer with a 2 second delay, and clicked the shutter. The self timer delay allows everything to settle before the shutter opens. The weight of the camera itself does a lot to dampen any movement, and my steady stance hopefully keeps the whole set up quite steady.
That technique of shooting with the camera hanging in front of me from it’s neck strap has an added advantage in that it is not as obvious that I am taking a photograph – and for this shot, given I didn’t want the main subject to move mid-exposure, that was especially important.
Recent Comments