Introducing creative blur to your images
Peter Wilson-Jones outlines a basic but highly creative technique for adding blur to your photos.
Graduated neutral density filters are commonly used as an on-camera aid for darkening overly bright skies, and they’re quite popular with dawn or dusk landscape shooters. Their counterpart - solid neutral density filters - were designed back in the days of film to make it possible to use high ISO film in overly bright, ‘out-of-range’ situations, or to allow wider apertures and/or shallower depth of focus.
Outside the square, neutral density filters combined with a tripod offer the perfect way to add creative blur into your daylight photography, and the possibilities are only limited by your imagination. With digital and film cameras, when attempting to photograph movement it's not hard to capture the blur of reasonably fast-moving objects like cars, bikes and trains, but to do so in the daytime you’ll usually be pushing your camera to its limits of ISO and aperture to be able to obtain a suitable effective shutter speed...
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Mirrorless Hybrids; Tips on fixing focus; Fungi up close; Profile - Peter Elfes; Understanding Layers in Photoshop; Locations - Karinjini NP, WA; Epson R3000 printer.
This story was first published in the Australian Photography May 2012 issue of Australian Photography > May 2012.
