Confessions of a Photographer: Movement

As part of the Summer brief, we were asked to produce six photographs in total, 3 each of a particular technique for capturing movement.

Locked off camera.


An example from Studio session.

I had actually experimented with this technique before - camera on a tripod, and set for a long exposure, focusing on a moving object. I'd previously done a couple of sessions - one outdoors, and one in a studio - where I'd used this method to try and capture the movement of Dance.

I decided this time to see if I could use this method without actually 'setting up' a shot. After some consideration, I took myself, my camera and my 10 year old daughter out to several of the local parks, over a few days during the holidays, and I filmed her playing both by herself, and with friends, on the playground equipment.

I also played around with using traffic . . .

And took a trip down to Bersham woods, to take some photographs of the moving river and weirs there.

I chose the following 3 shots as my final pieces.

Panning Camera.

In this technique, the method is to use a slightly faster shutter speed, focus and follow the moving subject, and take a photograph that leaves the subject mostly in focus, but the background blurred, in order to convey the movement.

I'd never tried this method before, so I spent at day at Llandudno, seeing what I could come up with.

I also spent a few hours up on the Horseshoe Pass

Initially, these were the 3 photographs I picked as my final 3

Once we returned to uni, we found this brief 'extended', and were asked to select one locked off motion, and one panning camera motion, photograph, to turn into an advertisement. I also had the opportunity to go and photograph a large cycling event, Etape Cymru, coming up; So after checking with Stewart, he agreed that if I came up with a suitable image from the Etape event, I could use that, for one of the 'advertisements' - Stewart has approved my final images, but had said that I could afford to make the subject in the panning camera shots a little more blurry to emphasise the sense of movement, so with that in mind, I took a series of images at the event.