The holidays are always a good time for me photographically. My real work winds down and I have more opportunities to not only experiment, but to also photograph without the interruptions of my ‘non-holiday’ life. I also get to see my children more. Both of those add up to more photographic experiences. I recently posted the above image on my FB page and multiple people asked me how I went about creating the effect. There isn’t any photoshop here this is one effect that can be created ‘in-camera’ with only a few setting changes and knowledge that most photographers already have in their arsenal of tools. My difficulty is that I need to take the time to think of them and then recall how to do them. Like all things photographic it starts with vision.
I have written in other blog posts about vision, what do you want to convey with your photo and how can you do the best job of telling that story. Thus the story starts with the pogo stick itself. Although my daughter is on the pogo-stick jumping the gift was in reality for my son. Buddy however was a little more timid of just jumping on and getting to it, Punkin’ wasn’t though. After a short demonstration by my wife (I won’t show that photo) Punkin’ was ready to venture out on her own. She very quickly grasped the concept and was able to quickly get 5-6 jumps in before she lost her balance or became tired. I have enclosed some of the early photos. Though I alike them they are missing a very important thing to making a better photo. MOTION! Jumping on a pogo-stick is not a static activity, there is movement and with movement there becomes a need to capture it best in our image by showing motion. What separate’s out the featured photo from the other photos is the ability to capture the motion in our image. I will detail how to do that below.
Most don’t think of static images as showing motion. In reality the photographer has a tool in their tool kit that the videographer doesn’t have, shutter speed. With photography you not only have control over depth of field, but also how long or short you gather light from the scene. A shorter shutter speed assists in freezing the action. When you want to capture activity football, soccer, auto or even bird photography the faster the shutter speed the better. Even if you have ample support with a tripod you might still have some motion blur from the person, car or animal. That little bit of motion ruins photos of this type. There are situations where you want to imply motion and for those situations blurring the subject may lead to some interesting and more important some eye-catching photography. Using motion blur as a creative device depends on basically two factors; Ambient light and the speed of the subject.
Some experimenting will be needed either before or during the session to make the creative decisions that will lead to the best photography. If your shoot is a one time event without redo’s then it will be critical to spend some time beforehand getting the correct shutter speed to capture the amount of blur that fits your image. Too little and it looks like your photo is just blurry. Too much and you may have a much different creative photograph than you intended. For the above situation I experimented with everything from 1/60 to 1/3. The photo you see above was at the 1/3. As you can see below of the collage of images there isn’t any wrong answer, it’s all what creative vision is. Along with ambient light the flash helps create the effect that you see highlighted image. The flash and how to use it or more importantly when it flashes.
For the sake of this article I will keep our flash sync discussion to a minimum. Suffice it to say there is much more information on front curtain sync and sync speed than will be discussed here.
My thanks to www.scantips.com for the images contained to help describe front curtain sync and rear curtain sync.
Generally front curtain sync is the mode that your flash uses during standard operation, any flash on any camera. When it fires it will be firing in front curtain sync mode. To my knowledge there isn’t a camera that has a setting for front curtain sync. The flash fires the instant the front curtain has fully opened and as you can see from the below photo you want to freeze the motion at the beginning of the exposure. As you can see below the ambient light creates a motion blur ahead of the subject. The motion blur is caused by a slower shutter speed than is needed to freeze the action. This can vary from image to image and situation to situation. For a speeding auto this could be 1/200 of a second for the below photo it was set at 1/20 second. Typical normal sync speed on most cameras is 1/60 of a second. This can sometimes be altered with a camera setting to slower or faster.
Many cameras, even some P&S cameras offer rear curtain sync mode. Unlike front curtain sync which is on every camera that has a flash. Rear curtain sync has to be selected in the menu system most likely, but is sometimes on the camera or in more rare cases the flash itself. This mode is used to freeze motion at the end of the exposure. What this means is that all of the ambient light is gathered and then the flash fires. Then the second curtain closes ending the exposure. As you can see below, rear curtain sync creates motion blur trailing the subject.
So why did I choose rear curtain sync? In this case I made in incorrect decision in the field that led to the correct visual photograph. After the initial photos which captured the action looking static I was left feeling *blah*. Because motion is important to this image, I opted to try a more creative photo. I made the decision to slow the shutter speed down in steps. Even then the initial photos also weren’t what I wanted. My vision for this photo was to capture the blur as the pogo stick hit the ground and then have the crisp shot at the crest just before she started her way down. I initially didn’t read the ambient light with my meter and that was my first mistake. I could have gotten to the correct photo much more quickly had I remembered to do this in the field. I chose Continuous High so I could fire off as many photos as possible and with her moving in the room I wanted to make sure the camera focused with her so she was always in focus. The initial setting the camera chose for me. For most cameras when the flash fires it will want to set the shutter at 1/60 since that is the standard flash sync. That 1/60 setting is what caused the earlier static photos. The second creative decision I made was to remove it off of front-curtain sync or standard mode. I was able to select rear curtain sync mode on my D700 on the camera. I did this correctly thinking that I needed to get the camera from making the decisions on shutter speed because it will always want to choose that 1/60 shutter speed. Rear curtain sync mode allows me to more easily alternate what shutter speed I need to use. The camera changes from wanting to light the whole scene with flash and defaulting to that 1/60 shutter speed to reading the ambient light. That is the default for front curtain sync. With this change it allows me to make the creative decisions to affect the photo the way I want.
After some experimenting with the correct amount of motion blur those decisions led to the highlighted photo. I could have gotten the same result another way and still kept it on front curtain sync. Do you know how that could have been done?
For those that thought take the camera to manual you would be correct. For most cameras you could have also selected aperture mode as well, but let’s focus on how I could have gotten to my final photo quicker.
Since the motion blur was of the up ’n down variety instead of from left to right I could have used either front curtain sync or rear curtain sync. If the motion was from left to right in the photo as seen in the above examples you would have to make a choice. To achieve the results I did using front curtain sync you need to put the camera in manual mode and measure the ambient light. Thankfully reading the ambient light is easy with your cameras internal light meter. There are many tutorials about this already online, I reference one here from Adorama. I would take two readings. One from the girl jumping and then another from the room around her. I would avoid the light on photo left since that will lead to problems. Average those two together and then set your camera for that in M or manual mode. Mount the flash on the camera in TTL mode and the flash is smart enough to give you just enough light for the scene and then fire. If you set the ambient light incorrectly you will get something similar to the photo below. The flash is exposing her nicely, that black blob is what the ambient light version of Punkin’ Not nearly as nice of photo. Since this was inside it was pretty easy to get to the desired 1/4 shutter speed and still only be at f/4.5. If you were outside and needed this slow of shutter speed you may need to use a smaller aperture or in some cases a ND filter. Experiment and find out!
There are many opportunities to use this technique to imply motion. I have only described one here, can you name some others? Add those to the comments below.
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I will bookmark this post. Thank you for a thorough explanation.
by Chris Mielke
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