Break the Rules: Make Blurry Pics!
One of the main things we always seem to be striving for when making photos is to get them sharp. We buy advanced cameras with expensive lenses, to get sharper pictures with the best possible rendering of every detail in a subject. This is fine - we all want to have that option in those cases when we prefer to have a nice sharp picture. But don’t forget that you can also get extremely interesting results by making really blurry images!
How do you get blurry pictures? Well, 1) either the camera or the subject (or both) moved during the exposure. Another reason, 2) is that the focus wasn’t set on the subject. Generally, it is the first type of blur that can give you great pictures, since when we see blur in a photo we associate that with movement. By contrast, we expect a picture of a scene that obviously isn’t moving to be sharp.
Take this nice picture of a running child for example. We clearly see from the body language of the child that this picture was captured when the child was running. Now, the slow shutter speed that was used also caused some blurriness - and THAT is what really gives life to the result!
Also, the background is far more blurred than the child, since the photographer panned the shot. This focuses interest on the main subject - the child. We don’t really care what the background looked like.
It is often said that when you make a picture of a moving subject like this, you should have more space in front of it than in the back - as is the case here, in the picture of the running child.
This is generally a good rule to follow, since it usually feels natural when the subject is moving into the picture space rather than out of it. Keeping this in mind, you may also experiment with breaking that rule! Sometimes you may want to create the effect of a moving subject slipping out of the picture, as in the bicyclist shot here. This bicyclist is going pretty fast, you can clearly feel the speed… actually so fast that he is already about to disappear - which is also emphasized by the fact that we see him from behind; he is gone past the position where the camera was. In that context, it feels natural that there is more space behind the bicycle than in front of it.
And, yes, this is also another example of very effective use of panning - ie. the camera follows the subject as the picture is snapped. When you do this, use a fairly slow shutter speed to obtain some motion blur.
Now, there are special types of blur which I will discuss i a later article, like blur in pictures of moving water… Stay tuned for more blur-type and whatever other photo tips!
Photo Credits: India road by shivganesh; running child by makelessnoise; bicyclist by stop.down
