Sunday, January 3, 2010

It's All a Blur

Week 28

I like sharp photos. I normally don't like photos with blur unless it is subtle and showing movement (here is an exception). But this week's post is about intentional blur.

The blur can be for intentional softness, to show movement, or just to add interest as I've tried to do here. To get the blur you can set the shutter speed low, shake the camera, zoom it during the exposure, or pan it. You can add a foggy filter or just make it out of focus.

For this shot I moved the camera and added something a little extra - I set my flash to go off during the camera movement. Setting a slower shutter speed when using flash is also known as "dragging the shutter".

The cool thing about this is that the flash freezes things the instant it goes off due to the short duration. In my picture only the christmas lights hanging from the trees show the blur. The light was low enough that the tree, people, etc. weren't lit by ambient and showed up only when the flash went off.

The camera is a Nikon D3 in aperture priority at f/3.5 with ISO fixed at 400. Exposure was 1/5 second. The flash is a SB-600 in TTL mode so the camera was doing all the hard work. The lens is a AF-S Nikkor 24-70mm 1:2.8G ED zoomed all the way out to 24mm.

There is very little post processing. I cropped the shot and added a little contrast.

Idea based on Blur, Blur, Blur, pages 14-15 in the book 50 Photo Projects by Lee Frost.

No comments:

Post a Comment