Stop, Motion.

When I first developed an interest in photography I’d see a blurry image and think “that’s no good it’s all blurry and out of focus”. I was taught a lesson by the great Ernst Haas and in particular this image of a Bullfighter. To me this is just a beautiful example of how showing motion in your photography can turn what might have been a boring photograph into a work of art.

I now really love to capture a sense of motion in my images, especially in my wedding photography dance shots, so you can convey to the viewer that the person was actually in motion, the lights were moving, there was energy, fun, atmosphere! There’s nothing worse than photos of a wedding reception with great disco lights where the photographer has chosen a relatively fast shutter speed of 300th of a second to capture a dancer perfectly frozen. The camera meter then thinks to itself “blimey that’s a fast shutter speed, it’s fairly dim in this party so I better crank out loads of flash, BAM”. You end up with the flash totally overpowering all the beautiful ambient disco lights and it looks like the party was being held in the middle of the day with no ambience or atmosphere.

With beginners there is nearly always a desire to show fast moving objects or subjects in a sort of “1000th of a second frozen in time” sort of way. Nothing wrong with that but mix it up with a few slow shutter shots.

Here are some examples from my own photography with information on camera settings and technique. For a more detailed explanation of Rear Sync Flash see my article featured in Photo Review Magazine. Panning is the technique of moving your camera along with and in the direction of a moving subject, see more on this here.