Dragging the point-and-shoot shutter

Posted by Philip in Old Photo Critique

This is a photo from 8 years ago.  It illustrates a way of dragging the shutter on a point-and-shoot camera.  One way to achieve this effect would be to turn off the flash.  Turning off flash in low light situations causes the automatic settings to slow the shutter speed down in order to pull in enough light for a proper exposure.  The slow shutter can cause interesting motion blurring.  The trick here is to have something in focus as a contrast to the motion blur.  It’s not as effective as intentionally slowing down the shutter but it can be effective.  In this case the motion blur is probably an accident, but this image turned out pretty neat.  Now if I just had a similar blur of someone bowling.  That would have made for a much better photo.