 How's it? How's it? Welcome back to the channel. It is fantastic to have you here. Today we're going to be looking at simple techniques that you can employ using any camera to create motion blur, shutter drag, that creative expression of movement within your images. Stop thinking about light as a static thing that is simply there to illuminate a subject. Think about it as a tool within your visual toolbox that you can employ in a liquidy kind of way. That you can ebb and flow across the centre. It can create crazy patterns, crazy ideas, wonderfully abstract things and bring a sense of life to your images. You can do this by leaving your shutter open for a longer time than is normally required. Often in today's modern world you're told that there are very rules, there are strict rules about shutter speeds and focal lengths and stuff. And that's because everybody is obsessed with sharpness in their images. But today we're not concerned with sharpness. We are concerned with blurriness, with that indistinct feeling that I feel is so vital to making your images feel alive. Because that's really what brings a photograph off the screen and really captivates us, is a sense of a liveness. Because we're seeing the world or being shown the world in a way that we cannot with our own two eyes. There's a lot of mumbo jumbo, higgledy-piggledy kind of stuff. They get talked about shutter speeds and all that sort of thing. And for the sake of this video there's only two things I want you to bear in mind regarding the technical side of things. One is that you're going to put your camera onto shutter priority. Whatever camera you're using there's a shutter priority option unless you're very old school, right? Okay put it on shutter priority, let the camera deal with the exposures and the rest of the stuff. All we're interested in in this exercise is playing with the length of time the shutter is open. And that's the next thing. So basically the slower the motion of the subject the longer exposure you're going to need to get some movement into that. And conversely if something is moving very quickly you can actually use a very quick shutter speed and still get motion in there. And this is why you won't find a definitive answer about how and what shutter speeds to use. It's very much dependent on the effect you're going for and the speed of the motion of the image or the object that you're photographing. So now that you know that the lens you know is being open for a length of time it's going to introduce some motion into images. There's a couple of ways that you can actually use that motion. The first one is panning. So again this is a very you know it's not a hidden secret that's for sure right? And you've seen it quite a lot. It's those images where the photographer stand in there and they pan with the subject. And here's some examples like with race cars you know that's a fairly obvious thing where the photographer moves the camera keeping the car more or less in the same point of the frame as they move the camera. So that means that the car or the object being photographed retains some of its detail while the background becomes a smear. The longer that the shutter is open or the slower that the object is moving the more smeary if you want to call it because that's a technical term. Yes smeary the object is going to be a fast car at 500th of a second is going to be frozen in time because it's just really moved just a fraction whereas the rest of the stuff relatively speaking has moved a lot. So that's again an illustration of why there isn't like a defined figure a number that I can say to you this is exactly what you want it's up to you how you want to employ motion in your photographs with the technique of panic. Do you want very subtle like the lady's hair or do you want it to be almost completely abstract to the point where it is just smears of indistinct light. It's a wonderful thing you know to quote you know Tony Montana you know the world is yours well he didn't say it was the good jeep limp said it but you get my point. So as a middle ground how do you introduce just a little bit of motion to give your images a sense of life. Well think about those photographs that you've seen I'm sure at some point of you know ladies with long hair where there's an explosion of hair and the hair has been static it's fixed in place and it doesn't move. Now that's okay right but the hair feels lifeless because hair doesn't do that in real life it moves and you introduce just a subtle amount of motion blow to give the hair a life and a vibrancy by keeping the shutter open just a little bit longer than you probably would to freeze the motion. So in this case let's say one one twenty-fifth of a second will be enough to freeze the motion right let's go to an eightieth of a second so it's open for a little bit longer because that might give the tips of her hair time to move but it will keep the rest of her face static because her face obviously is not moving at the same speed as the tips of her hair. You can see this in work again there's a wonderful photograph this is also this is a lovely photograph of this bird in flight the photographer is panning with the with the bird as it flies and has a shutter speed that is enough to freeze the motion of the bird's head and its beak but is long enough to let the wings have a flutter have a sense of purpose because birds fly they move that's the beauty of these things see how even just a little step out from what's the norm for a sharp image all of a sudden lens your photographs a sense of life and that's what I love about photographs they have a sense of life that they must be vibrant not from a color point of view but but an image that has movement for me is so exciting take this photograph of a lady in front of a carousel at a fairground now that's wonderful and I hope you're beginning to see about how this might actually have been achieved so you know the photographers stand in there and they've gone oh well I see the carousel is moving and they've gone oh well maybe like you know a fifth of a second or half of a second would be long enough to get a lot of you know motion through the carousel but it's also short enough that I could probably handhold this image because my friend standing by the railings there she's not going to move and what I'll do is to make sure she won't move is I'm going to pop some flash on her a to bring her up to the same exposure as the carousel but also that's going to be a very short buff on the sensor of light hitting the sensor and the rest of the time she's going to be dark and it won't interfere too much that's a little bit more of a of a you know a next level kind of motion blur and if you'd like me to go into more depth about that in another video then please you know do let me know in the comments below but see what's happened is so the photographers combine anything if that carousel was frozen in motion the the image would be too busy right but because they've allowed the carousel to smear its light all over the sensor it's become broken down into an abstract form and that's why you see quite often you know illustrations of motion in images being photographed like with light trails and what have you because it's easy to explain what's going on you can see what's what's happening in the image and and let's be frank they are quite they're quite dramatic and they look pretty cool at this point you may be thinking okay well alex is only talking about things that move things that are in motion and that's what you get the motion now you can introduce motion blur into objects that are static look at these these photographs here right so these I took in our dining room the other night the light was wonderful I thought okay well just let's just take some pictures with my phone there's nothing special here and that's why I said you can do this with with any you know camera anything that could take photographs and I went okay well I'm going to use these actually as an example to show to you so here's somewhere I took you know it's it's fairly static and then there's a longer exposure and I've kind of moved the camera around a bit like that you know but sort of back and forth and then I've kind of spun the camera a little bit to create other effects I've moved it in various ways during the exposure to create environments that are ethereal strange unusual different to what we would normally see now this is not the world's greatest photographs I concede in their illustrations but I want you to see that you don't need to have static as you don't need to have motion in the images inherently just to have motion you can bring it into anything one of those photographs was like a spinning kind of effect and that's kind of very close to zooming as well there's a thing you can do if you have a zoom lens with a long exposure during the length of the exposure you can change the focal length of the image and you'll get this zoom effect you know we've all still seen that now at a very basic level that can be a little bit a little bit cliched and that's always I think you know some of the important things to consider with all of these ideas is that don't just use them for the sake of using them use them if you're going to use them for a reason they're not going to make a boring photograph look great by just you know zooming them up right look at those those tables there's landscape but the landscape my lounge images they're okay but they don't become amazing because I put an effect on them now if you don't have a zoom lens you can of course move you can run towards the subject you could if you are dexterous enough run away from the subject but that will introduce a zoom kind of feel you know so you can see how you're playing with things you're throwing a lot of the rules that you're saying I don't care I'm going to try things out I remember taking some photographs of a wood during you know my application of photo school and I went well pictures of wood are kind of boring and I'd seen an image in a magazine I'll give that a try and I had a half a second exposure and I just jumped up and down because the beauty was I didn't know what I was going to get you know especially given this film and that's the wonderfulness about this this is not the same as sticking on photoshop filters you know the blur effect or the motion or the radial blur and these are things they give you a somewhat repeatable you know what effect what we are looking here is throwing ourselves on the mercy of light and photography and seeing what it comes up with take a moment look at some of these photographs and and think for a second if you can recognize the technique that the photographer is employing within the image is it a very subtle motion blur or are they panning are they zooming in and out are they jumping around is the subject in motion or is the camera in motion there are an infinite variety of ways that you can create these wonderful vibrant and exciting photographs just have the the ability to not worry too much about if you are doing it right or wrong I cannot stress this enough in this area of photography there is nothing that is defined there is nothing that is right there's nothing that is wrong it is entirely up to you and what you are trying to achieve the the motion and the feeling you will know when it's right for what it is that for what it is that you want to do so just have that freedom of expression of of seeing what happened there's some photographs here that I'm showing you which come from that exact idea of trying things out they were photographed in my studio I said we weren't going to talk about you know any special equipment or what have you and there is no studio light on this this is using the fluorescent overheads in my studio but I was like oh you know I'm going to try and photograph in the worst lighting conditions I can possibly think of and I tried things out I tried a long exposure and always so things and what happened was that I thought okay well it's just a bit of a blur it's a bit of a thing but what if I just take one of my little handheld flashes and just pop that flash originally or if I ask the person to move around just a little bit and see what happens and I'm going to give you a practical demonstration on screen here so you know I've now reduced the shutter speed on this and you can see that I'm moving around I've got a bit of motion but you see how my hands are going ooh like this but my phase is kind of somewhat static that's what we're looking to do with these we can play with ideas we can bring in lots of different techniques and exploit us just see what happens anyway so here we are we're back into the world of like kind of regular shutter speeds and those images came from me being inspired by a photographer called Nadev Kander who does some very interesting things with motion very subtly within his photographs and I was trying to replicate that by dissecting and looking into his images if you'd like to see more of that kind of content here where I look at famous photographers take apart their images see how we can implement those ideas in our own photography then again please let me know in the comments below finding inspiration for using these techniques that you've kind of learned and you can sort of see that really you know it boils down to just kind of leave the shutter open and see what happens is wonderful because you see so many ideas and so many directions of things that you had never thought of a photographer like Ernst Haas uses longer exposure as long as shutter speeds to bring a sense of motion and artistic sort of blurriness to bullfighting he's not showing the bullfighting per se but he's showing the feeling of that frenzy of emotion it's in the images there is a Japanese photographer called Hiroshi Sugimoto who goes to the extreme he photographs candles as they burn down as they you know just disintegrate into nothing and has these massively long exposure we can't see a candle burn down in its entirety so what a wonderful way of looking at the world Chris McCaw has a book which I've talked about on the channel before called Sunburn where he has taken images of the sun traversing the sky and as it has done so it has burnt physical holes into the film that he's taking the pictures with these are all examples of long exposure sports photographers you know they are masters of introducing either you know the feeling and that emotion like Ernst Haas into a sport or giving us a real sense of motion and of movement that's all you know about introducing that life into the image the movement and you can do this with whatever camera that you have you don't need a fancy camera you don't need any lenses if you want the longer exposure you know a tripod is going to help you and there's some neutral density filters and that's really kind of beyond the remit of this this is about encouraging you to go out there to take photographs of things in motion to show the people who look at your images the world that they cannot see doesn't matter if you picked up a camera last week or you've had a camera for 20 years you can learn something new by letting the camera show you what life looks like at 130th of a second and slower he said that was a really weird sort of thing because i got to the end of that i went hang on 130th of a second is a it's not a real shutter speed it will say it's very very quick but anyway you know my point go out and see what the world looks like when you look at it with eyes that you can't for more practical ways that you can harness the power of light within your images no matter your skill level don't check out this video over here because i know that it'll be exceptionally useful for you thank you ever so much for watching and i'll see you again soon