 Have you ever been with your camera in a situation where you thought, wow, I would really love to capture how dynamic the motion in this image is? You know, say you're watching a sport game and someone is moving really quickly and you thought, wow, I'd really like to get that blur in just the right way. Just not too much blur, but not too little. I want to show this motion. Well, this is all a part of something that photographers call capturing motion. Capturing motion is something that kind of takes a little bit of experience and know how to do. Anyone can take a blurry image, but taking a blurry image that captures just what you want is really kind of a little bit of the art of photography. So in order to understand this, like we've talked about in a lot of other lessons, you need to understand the technical side of what creates motion blur, and you also need to understand the artistic side, so what you exactly want to achieve. So how about we start really quickly by reviewing something that we talked about in our shutter speed lesson, to some degree in our ISO lesson. We're going to talk really quickly about shutter speeds. So I'm going to kind of divide our page in half here because I've got something to do over here on the other side in a little bit. We're going to talk about shutter speed. All right, so I basically divide when I'm talking about shutter speeds. I divide them up into what I would call long shutter speeds, slow shutter speeds. Then there would be normal shutter speeds, fast, and then super fast, which really is probably more just something that I have made up, not necessarily all that important to remember the super fast description. Now a long shutter speed is going to be about one second or longer, so up to 30 seconds plus. You're going to have here when you're talking about a shutter speed of one second, that's like one second right there. So that's quite a long time. A lot can happen in one second when you're taking a photograph. Now when we're talking about slow photographs, I would say, slow shutter speeds are somewhere between one half, and I would put the border right around a fourth, a 40th of a second. So that's a pretty wide range right there. It could be probably a little slower and it could probably be a little faster, but that's probably maybe a good kind of standard set of slow shutter speeds where you can get lots of motion blur. Starting around a 150th of a second or maybe a 60th of a second, the shutter speed sort of starts to get high enough that you can actually kind of do something with it. So I would call that sort of an average shutter speed, and I would run average normal shutter speeds up to about 125th of a second, depending on the usage. But you'll also notice I'm going to make a little overlap here on the next description. A fast shutter speed can in some situations be 125th of a second. Sometimes you don't have much movement in a scene, so a 125th of a second shutter speed might be kind of fast for that situation. So here there's a little bit of overlap. And then I would take those fast shutter speeds up to 1,000th of a second, which is sort of the old standard 1,000th of a second with sort of the upper limit among a lot of cameras for a very long time until very recently, really, into the last two decades or so, where camera speeds have just really increased a lot. And now I would call those other shutter speeds the ones that are sort of new. I would call them super fast, and those are just 1,000th plus. And they go up nowadays even in consumer cameras up past 8,000. You even see faster than 8,000th of a second now in some consumer cameras, which is pretty darn amazing. All right, so that's our review of your shutter speeds. I really encourage you to go check out our shutter speed lesson if you are a little rusty on that. We talk very a little bit more in depth about what shutter speeds can capture what. Now when you want to go capture that blur in your image and you want to create a sort of a cool blurry effect in your images, you need to kind of make some considerations. You're sitting there with your camera and you've got the situation happening in front of you and you think, okay, here are the three things I need to think about in order to capture this correctly or in order to know how to capture this correctly. So we've got one, two, and three. First of all, you're going to want to think of the speed of your subject. So we talk about this in the shutter speed lesson a little bit. A slow shutter speed is really going to be able to capture certain types of motion where some motion is too slow to be captured with that and you need a long exposure. Some things are too fast so you need a little bit higher of an exposure. A really quickly moving car might blur with a very fast shutter speed whereas a person who is walking might just blur with a slow shutter speed. So you just kind of need to consider exactly what shutter speed is best suited for the thing that you're doing and you can do that by looking it up online or going and checking out our shutter speed lesson. You also want to consider your distance. And really, when you're talking about distance, you actually are thinking about the size of your object in the image. And I'll show you an example of that a little bit later. But the smaller the image, the slower your shutter speed is going to need to be. So the smaller your object is in the image, the slower your shutter speed is going to need to be to capture that motion because they're not making very much motion through the scene or through across your pixels inside your camera on your sensor. So that is another thing. And the last question that you want to ask yourself, number three is how much motion do you want to convey? So how would I write that? Let's see. I'm just going to write motion and convey. So how much do you want it to blur is basically the question that you want to ask. How much do you want that person to be or that object to be completely sort of blurred out or do you want them to be just a little bit there? That's something you need to know. And that also will determine how and which one of these shutter speeds you select. Let's take a couple examples now. So here is me on my bicycle just recently. I bought a fisheye lens and I was riding home. I was so excited. I did something very dangerous and I took a photograph while I was riding down this bike path here. This image was taken at ISO 800. It was evening. It was getting really kind of dark outside. The f-stop was at 3.5. And my shutter speed, now this is the determining factor in whether something blurs, was one-eighth of a second. So one-eighth was my shutter. And you can see that it was a one-eighth of a second. I would look at this image as someone who takes a lot of photographs and I would just know immediately that this was in this neighborhood. I wouldn't maybe know that it was eighth of a second, but I would know that it was less than a fifteenth of a second, depending on how fast I was riding. Again, that's a question of speed. But you can see here the motion is being captured here. You know you're losing detail. And this is also a perfect example of how proximity to something and the size of something can make a big difference. In theory, I'm moving the exact same speed through this entire frame, through this entire image, but because these cars back here are so much smaller in my frame, they blur a lot less. And as we get closer, you can see each car is blurring a little bit more. So in order to capture this scene, I knew I needed about an eighth of a second. And luckily with digital cameras, you can try out lots of different things and see what works for you. You can also see that that eighth of a second, my arm and the front of my bike didn't move very much in relation to my camera. So my camera was pretty still. I was riding on a smooth path. And you can see that my handlebar didn't flip from side to side and I didn't move my hand very much. So that has captured pretty well in focus and pretty clearly, you know, not without much motion blur. So the difference between what this part of the picture here, down here, needs in order to be tack sharp and what this right here needs is very different because of the speed relationship according to the camera. It's not just how fast I'm moving, but how fast an object is moving in relation to a camera. So that's a really important thing to remember. Now here is another picture, a very different photo. And this is an image that really captures motion and freezes it. So this is, I guess photographers would call this freezing motion. And this is my neighbor Amin and he is jumping out of the window. He and his brother were playing tag in our garden the other day and I thought that was a perfect example of capturing motion. So my ISO is 100. Choose a different color for the rest of this here. And my F stop is F 1.8. So I was using one of my favorite lenses. And my shutter speed. What do you think my shutter speed would be here? He's moving pretty quickly. He just jumped right out the window. Well, my shutter speed is 1,400th of a second. So 1,400th of a second is pretty fast, but still, even though it's very fast, you can see a little bit of motion blur on his foot here. Now everything else is pretty solid. He's pretty, especially his hand must have been staying right in place. But you can still see there's a little bit of motion blur at a 400th of a second if something is moving very fast like Amin here. But you can see the wall and everything else is totally in focus and sharp. So it makes a very big difference. Shutter speed can make a big difference. Can you imagine maybe what this image would look like at maybe a 30th of a second? That would be a very different image. You would probably barely even be able to see him. You would just be a blue and brown blur. That's a pretty different image. Now here is an image taken in my neighborhood a couple months back. And I was just sort of on my way to the train station and I saw this lighting was somehow cool. And I saw this guy with this very cool hat come around the corner. And I whipped out my camera really quickly and took a photograph. This photograph was taken at ISO. I had my old film camera with me. So this camera was, I was stuck with my ISO at ISO 200. And my f-stop would have been most likely around 1.8. And I always carry that film camera with me all the time. And I'm guessing that my shutter speed was about a 30th of a second if I remember right. It might, maybe, might have been down around a 15th as well. And this is, again, an important detail. You can see here the distance from me to this subject is pretty far. He's pretty far away. But you can see here the motion blur of his leg, motion blur up here. You can see this, his foot, is very stable, very sturdy. He's not, he's not, that's not moving right now because it's stuck on the ground and he's pivoting over it. But this part right here, this foot is moving and his body is kind of reaching over to his right. And so you can see here that is the motion that I've captured. And this is an amount of blur that I really like because this makes this man kind of unidentifiable. He's sort of hard to see, but you see the his shape. He's not overly blurred or under blurred, I think, for this situation. It's not the most amazing photo, but it's a nice photo of the train station that I always go to. All right. And here is another example of two photos that aren't amazing, but they do capture sort of blur and about at the same time or speed. And this photo to the left here is ISO 400. Taken at f2.8 and my shutter speed was a 15th of a second. And I really need to get better at picking good colors for the backgrounds here. 1 15th of a second. And so you can see here that someone can move pretty far in a 15th of a second. Again, I'm about the same distance as I was from the guy in the train station. But you can see here again, the foot that's on the ground is pretty stable. Everything else is sort of in motion. You can see these people back here might be moving, but because they're so far away, it's a little harder to catch that motion blur. And you can see everything else in the background is pretty stable because I held the camera very, very steady. Over here to the right is a very different story. This is at a museum and I was shooting at ISO 200. It was in a memorial for the Holocaust. My f-stop was at 1.8 and my friend here, Ingrid, is walking into the door of this memorial room and I took the photo at about a quarter of a second. I also just happened to shake my hand when I was taking the photograph. So the camera moved a little bit and you can see that here on every detail is just a little bit off and I may have even been a little out of focus now that I look at it. But what I like about this is the motion of her hand right here and the motion of her leg and her head. These are all really interesting. I think the door is all so you can see the door bends here at the bottom, right there, bends. And that's just the door moving in the image. Actually the door wasn't really bent like that. So this is just a way of capturing motion. It's a little bit more artistic. It's definitely not like my favorite photograph but I like the colors and I like the motion of it and it's an impactful memory. It was a very impactful place that we were at. So I would definitely, if you try out everything, try out a 15th of a check and try out a quarter of a second and see what the difference is when you do that sort of thing. Now here if you want to do something interesting you can also try to capture your foreground in focus and get the background blurred. So in a lot of the photos so far it's been the subjects that's been blurring. This is a photo from a telescope lab somewhere in California and it's a long exposure where they put the camera on the body of this telescope and the top was then moved around and you can see the background then blurred. So this is the background blurring. You can see the desert back there where they're up in the mountains of I think of California. So that's another thing that you have at your disposal. You can choose also to blur the background and not necessarily the thing that's in focus. So you want to find a shutter speed that says, okay, this thing in the foreground will be solid. It will be sharp. It will be in focus and the background will be blurred. What do I need to do that? So in order for that to happen the camera has to move with the subject or the subject has to stay and the background has to move. So you want to think about that background blur. All right, so that was your lesson about capturing motion blur and using blur as a tool in your composition. You can check out more lessons here at alversity.org.