BLUR Slow shutter speed

Motion blurred picture can be taken in two ways. The first option is that if we would like to take a photo of a moving object and it is blurred but the background is still. The second option is panning the camera when the fixed background is blurred but the moving object can be fixed if the speed of the object is harmonized to the panning speed of the camera. The current tip is about taking photo of a moving object taken with still camera (mounted on a tripod). I have chosen a fountain in Budapest to take a blurred picture where people really like to get cool in summertime. The water jets of the fountain are placed in a square shape that make water pillars next to each other forming a fence. These water columns were in the focus to make them blurred and foamy as the exposure time was increased to 2 seconds. The day when the photo was taken, was really hot and many people walked through the refreshing water. And someone did more …

Setup of the camera

First a steady tripod is necessary to take these kind of pictures, which grands nice, sharp background to emphasize the motion objects. In case of using tripod we also should pay attention to the setting of the camera. At least we should switch off the image stabilizer (if applicable) and also enable the mirror lockup (DSLR) to reduce the undesirable resonation. Actually, now we have a camera setup to take a good motion blurred picture but we still should go ahead in the setting because in case of a sunny day, when the exposure time is expected below 1/60 s even though the aperture is increased above f/11 we should slow down the shutter speed with ND filter. I used a NDx400 (Neutral Density) filter that means to increase the shutter speed with 8 stops, which let me set the aperture to f/14 (in AE mode) and received 2 s for shutter speed. 2 second shutter speed is quite good to receive nice motion blur effect.

Composition

The camera was mounted on a tripod, so I had time to make a strict composition with diagonal lines and balanced setting of the sitting man. Applying 2 sec shutter speed the inner space of the fountain was expected to be cleared i.e. the people moving around the fountain was vanishing (or almost vanishing) and let us focusing on the sitting man. There are sensors build in the fountain, which control the water jets so if someone is getting close enough to the water-fence than the water stops in front of the people to let him cross over. In the left hand sided upper corner of the picture you can see the stopped jets and also some of it, which just started to work (the people who were give rise to stop and start the water-jets are vanished due to the long shutter speed).

Afterwork

Looking at the original picture it can be seen that there are poor colors, white foamy water, gray and black stone pavement so it was obvious to try a black&white version. I used a harsh, high dynamic conversion type of contrast to emphasize the details of the black stones. I liked the B&W conversion but the main figure of the picture (the sitting man) was merged into the foamy water-fence. Putting the layer of the B&W picture over the color one I have erased the sitting man on the B&W layer to make visible the color version, which helped to keep focus on the man getting cool.