BURNING
WIRE
Blur and Motion: Laziness or knowing what works?
To many people, an image containing blur or movement can be deemed to be almost a failure, not technically correct, or somehow lacking in skills required to get a pristine, perfect image.
I believe that blur and motion are not only welcome in many images, but absolutely have the power to elevate an image from a mere (although technically accurate),”snapshot” into something almost living and breathing, a study of form and fluidity, rather than a still life study of a butterfly pinned to a backboard, for scientific observation.
Knowing when:
As in many things in life, knowing when and how to apply motion, blur and movement into an image is the key to success-you wouldn’t include blurred shots in a still-life observation of a bowl of fruit, neither would you include creative motion shots in a wallpaper catalogue.
But you can use blur in such places as the portrait studio, where some movement can add drama and depth to an otherwise conventional image, such as in the photo’s below. In the first image, shooting at 1/30th sec, handheld, I got the model to spin around and timed my shot to capture her when her face had sopped, but there was still energy and bounce in her hair. In the second image, taken at 1/15th of a second and once again hand-held, I simply asked the model to hold her hair up and let it fall through her fingers. Both images are made much stronger by the inclusion of movement, in my opinion.
Sport:
Sports photography is another place where opinions differ. The newspapers want clean, crisp slices of time, with no blur-so much so, the recent massive development in high ISO capable performance SLR’s has been driven by professional photographers needing to capture studio quality work, often in the most challenging of conditions.
Again, I am happy to comply with the wishes of newspaper editors, as it is they who sign the cheques, but I always find much more drama in an image with (some) blurred lines and at least some sort of feeling of the speed and intensity involved. Below are four examples of Sports photography, two captured at 1/8000th of a second, to perfectly isolate every sensation of movement and two images taken at a much slower speed, incorporating panning, in order to remove a somewhat cluttered background. Personally, I am much, much happier with the images taken with blur and motion.
Frozen in time:
A little bit of movement.
As in all things Art related, it’s all out subjectivity-one man’s meat is another man’s poison and my opinions will differ wildly from those of others.
What does matter, is the ability of the Photographer to be technically able to producer either type of image, at will, via a deep and comprehensive understanding of which buttons to push, and when.