The Photography Tip of the Week #064

Posted by Philip in Podcast

Yeehaw! Drag that shutter.

064 Photography Tip of the Week (audio)

What a strange term. Don’t most people hit or press the shutter button?  So how does one drag the shutter.  Do you throw a lasso around it like a calf and drag it behind your horse? Even at a rodeo they don’t do that. The concept of dragging the shutter is to slow down the speed below what is necessary to freeze the action and achieve that sharpness to you subject we all desire.  You can do that several ways.

1. Put your camera in manual mode and pick all of your settings.  But if you are doing this by trial and error, it can take a long time to get all the settings correct.

2. Put your camera in shutter priority mode and select an appropriate shutter speed.  Some where between 1/60th to 1/3rd a second will do for most of your images.  Leaving the rest of the settings in auto will allow you to only change one variable at a time and you can quickly get the look you want.

3. Put your camera in aperture priority mode, but in this case you will be selecting an aperture based on what your camera reads as the shutter speed.  Some times I like to do it this way when the lighting conditions aren’t optimal.  This way I can set my ISO around 200 and open up my aperture.  It’s almost like manual mode, but the shutter speed will automatically adjust if you are in continuous shooting mode so you will still have well exposed images.

So why would you slow down a shutter?  Won’t you end up with a lot of blurry photos? Yes you will.  Quite a lot actually.  But if you pan with the action you can still achieve a sharp image on your subject and get a motion blur from your panning.  Just like this one, very blurry, not worth keeping.  Panning with your subject takes a lot of practice.  Even with that practice, you will still get a lot of blurry photos.  But you do have the prerequisite of knowing where your subject is going.  A speeding car is relatively easy to pan with since it’s most often going at a constant speed and in a straight line relative to your point of view.  Panning with people or animals is a bit more difficult since  they are prone to erratic behavior and will wobble relative to your point of view.

What makes for a good dragged shutter image is contrast.  Not necessarily color contrast or value contrast, but focus contrast.  You don’t have to have your subject tack sharp.  You may only get one in a million attempts tack sharp.  But if you have a strong enough contrast between the motion blur of the background and your subject is mostly in focus, a little blur around the edges won’t detract from the image at all.  In this case, your eye will initially go to the sharpest area of an image.  It’s a relative thing and doesn’t have to be 100% sharp.  An intriguing image will capture your attention.  Even if it is a little blurry.

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