Adding a little blur
Remember it: The first blur you added to a picture was not on purpose. The second was the same. But lateron there comes the point where you think of the pictures with long shutter speeds and light trails. Motion, and with it also action, comes back to your pictures.
Now you have to practice for your blur to look like on purpose. Actually you can distinguish two forms:
- The background stays fixed and there are elements on your picture which become blurred. To add some motion to your pictures with people or cars shutter speeds starting from 1/20 or longer show nice effects. You can still hold 1/20 or 1/15 and get good results – anything else requires some help (tripod, a plain surface or similar).
- The background gets blurredand you draw the camera. This might be a little bit tricky. Remember to turn off image stabilization or turn on any special mode (if available – the Canon Powershot S95 has a mode for horizontal drawing).
There you are and get to the next problem. It is a bright day and the motion effect of type I has one problem. The shutter speed is simply to long. That’s right. Without any filter which helps you to cheat some f-stops you come to another border of photography: Overexposure.
You will learn by the time, that a little bit of overexposure can be compensated in postproduction (I would say 2 f-stops, but do not take my word as a rule – it is my experience) and even better if you work with RAW. It will give you possibilities JPEG cannot offer you.
Still the motion can bring back life to your shots and make ordinary things look interesting. People crossing a street might get an anonymous stream of mass or simply look vibrant enough not to be boring. When will you start to experiment?
