Fun with Motion Blur

So let’s talk about an interesting article today called Motion Blur!

Contrary to popular belief, your photographs don’t always have to be Sharp!

Shocking right? Yea, sometimes a blurred pic says a lot about the photograph, depending on what the photographer was trying to capture and how the image was taken.

As Kevin mentioned in his earlier post on, "how to click Good Photographs", There are no rules to photography. What is important, is what the photographer is trying to portray in the image.

Like all Topics of Photography this one is very vast and not possible to cover in just one post so we’ll break this down in parts.

What is Motion Blur?

A simple definition would be- An image captured of an object in motion (vehicles moving, people dancing, spinning wheels, etc) which show the movement of the object in the form of a blur or streak of light around the object is what is known as a Motion Blur. Examples are below.

This is caused namely because either the moving object was too fast for the camera’s shutter to capture it in a ‘Still / freeze’ shot and / or the photographer deliberately lowered the shutter speed of the camera in order to capture the object’s motion in the form of a Blur.

There as two types of Motion Blur.
1. In which the object in focus is 'Still', while the surroundings are blurred (also commonly known as Panning)
2. The Surrounding are 'Still' and the object in focus is blurred.

But why would you want blurred images?

Motion Blur photography gives us a 2 dimensional view of the object in the image. Unlike still photographs, we can determine the movement and are aware that the object is focus is not just standing still.

Here below is another interesting shot of Motion Blur.

1. What do you notice in this image?

2. What do you think the people are doing here?

This photograph was taken on Yacht Trip a couple of days back. Unfortunately due to low lighting, we were struggling to get any good shots of this dancing group enjoying themselves.

Kevin suggested that we try to click at a slower shutter and instantly we noticed the results were pretty amazing. Now we could capture them dancing about and enjoying themselves and not just still images of people in funny looking poses.

This post will just give you an example of what Image blur / Motion blur is and how it can be used to bring the snap to life.

We will cover the technical aspects on this subject on a later date.
Until then, be it ‘Moving or Still objects’, if you like what you see don’t be afraid to SnapThat!