Digital Focus: Shoot Moving Subjects With Ease

Feature: Capturing Motion Blur

Photography involves a contradiction: Our lives are in constant motion, but photographs offer only freeze frames. Sometimes pictures are supposed to be static; often we'd like them to reveal something of the action that was taking place when we pressed the shutter release. In past newsletters, I've told you how to add a sense of motion to your photos using filters in your computer's image editing program: See Digital Focus: Add Motion to Your Photos and Digital Focus: More Tricks for Putting Motion in Photos.

Panning for Motion Blur

This week let's talk about capturing motion directly with your digital camera, using a technique called panning. Panning lets you capture your subject in sharp focus while turning the background into a blur of motion. What's it look like? Check out a picture I took at a fair several years ago.

So how do you pan? In a nutshell, you need to twist your body in sync with the motion of the subject as you press the shutter release. Position yourself in a spot where you can easily follow the moving subject without having the camera's line of sight blocked. Also, consider this: The closer you are to the subject, the faster you'll have to pan. That means you'll get a blurrier background, but it'll be harder to keep the subject sharp.

If your digital camera lets you adjust the shutter speed--using a shutter priority or manual exposure mode--set it for about 1/60 second. If you can't assign the shutter speed, be sure not to put the camera in a mode where it will try to use the very fastest speed available, as it would in its "action" mode.

Anchor your feet, then pivot your whole body with the motion of the subject as you track it through the camera's viewfinder or on the LCD. (Using the display lets you stabilize the camera by bracing your elbows against the sides of your chest while smoothly following the subject.) Press the shutter release and continue tracking the subject until you know that the shutter has closed.

Follow-through is important in sports, and it's important in action photography: You need to continue to pan with your subject even after the shutter releases. This ensures that you won't stop panning in the middle of the exposure. Also, you'll get your best pictures when you can pan at the right speed to keep the subject centered in the frame throughout the entire exposure, and that takes a little practice. You may need to try panning a few times to get the shot right.

Motion Without Panning

There's another way to show action in your photos: You can hold the camera rigidly in place and let the action scream through the viewfinder as you take the picture, capturing the subject's motion, not the background's. If you're shooting in broad daylight with a reasonably fast shutter speed, you can probably hold the camera for this kind of shot. If you're shooting with a slow shutter speed in a dark location, though, I recommend mounting the camera on a tripod. For example, I photographed a moving subway car in a New York subway station. I took the picture at about 1/15 second, while bracing myself against the wall of the subway--I didn't have a tripod available.