Tips for better understanding shutter speed (Part two)

By Dylan Goldby | 13 May 2021

Intentional Camera Movement

Intentional Camera Movement, or ICM, is when we deliberately move the camera during an exposure for creative effect. This could be panning, tiling, spinning, or even, as some brave souls have done, tossing the camera in the air. These techniques create directional blur in our photographs and give a feeling of motion to the viewer.

© Dylan Goldby - The constant breeze off the lake and watching the snow fly off Mt. Fuji inspired this image. I wanted the viewer to feel that cool breeze as well as the warmth of the morning sun. Fujifilm X100F, f/11, 5.3 Seconds, ISO 200 (10-stop ND filter).

Panning

A simple way to use ICM is to pan your camera with a moving object. If you can move the camera at exactly the same speed as the thing you’re photographing, you will end up with the object being rendered sharp and the background turning into a blur.

This can be used to make something appear to be moving extremely fast. Think about those images we see after racing events of motorcycles or cars in perfect focus with the background being rendered as streaks rather than legible objects. This is the result of panning.

A quick and easy way to make sure you’re panning at the right speed is to put the subject you want to photograph inside one of the focus squares in your viewfinder. That way you can just follow the subject using that square. This also makes it easier to follow a subject when there are things moving in random directions in your frame.

© Dylan Goldby - This image is the result of panning to follow the gentleman at the back. Despite the crowd we are instantly drawn to him. He is relatively sharper than the others in the scene and a touch brighter as well. If there were detail in every single person in this image as well as the background, he would not stand out nearly as much. Following one subject in a group of many that are moving in different directions can be a great way to accentuate motion as well since many of those objects will be moving in an opposing direction to your camera motion. Fujifilm X100F, f/5.6, 1/15, ISO 6400.

Tracking a single subject, however, is not the only way to make use of this technique. Allowing all objects to blur can give a sense of chaos or constant motion. Crowds of moving people or flocks of birds can be extremely chaotic to the eye.

Using camera movement to convey this to your viewer, rather than trying to keep a single subject sharp while blurring others, can be an effective way to trigger the emotion you felt at the time of photographing in them as they look at your photographs.

© Dylan Goldby - With the number of moving objects in this scene and the erratic nature of their movement, there was no way I would be able to get them sharp. By embracing this and knowing that the feeling of this constant procession would be conveyed, I slowed my shutter down and made several frames as the drummers passed my seat. Fujifilm GFX 50R + GF 45mm f/2.8, f/2.8, 1/10, ISO 320.

Steady to Blur

We looked at photographing cityscapes with moving traffic and water flowing above. This is a great example of keeping something in your frame rock solid while allowing other things to blur.

This doesn’t have to be restricted to inanimate objects, however. Having a couple hug in a crowd of passers by or choosing someone who is lost in a book to photograph as the world moves around them can express the slowness of a moment or two juxtaposed lifestyles by using motion. The keys to making this work are avoiding camera shake and movement in your subject.

© Dylan Goldby - Tokyo, like many other Asian megacities, does not stop. Things are constantly in flux and people are constantly on the move. This image of a train speeding across a railway crossing gives a good example of a shutter speed that could freeze the pedestrians patiently waiting to cross while the moving train gets blurred into stripes of light. Fujifilm X100F, f/8, 1 second, ISO 200.

Flash Photography

As one final technique for making use of your shutter speed, we’ll look at flash photography. While we don’t have enough space on these pages to go into depth about the relationship between shutter speed and aperture when it comes to flash photography, the basic rule is that shutter speed controls the amount of ambient light in your flash/ambient mix but has no effect on the flash component.

By making use of this idea, we can control the amount of contrast in our images or even make use of flash in images that employ long shutter speeds to blur objects.

A flash happens over a fraction of a second. By combining this with a long exposure, we can illuminate a subject and freeze them in place with our flash and allow the dragging of the shutter speed to produce the same effects we saw above.

Conversely, we can also use the shutter speed to darken a scene and make a subject stand out more (think about those badly exposed party photos with flash and then add a level of control to the exposure).

© Dylan Goldby - By dragging the shutter, I was able to get the tendrils of fire you see here. Then, on top of that, I popped a flash to make sure my subject was illuminated well and frozen in time despite the slow shutter speed. Fujifilm X-T2 + XF 35mm f/1.4, f/3.6, 1/4, ISO 400.

Wrapping Up

There are so many ways to use your shutter speed for creative effect in photography. The examples in this article are just scratching the surface.

Spend some time experimenting with how your shutter speed affects the images you make and you’re guaranteed to get some creative results.