How To Capture Motion with your Digital SLR

Article and Car Pictures by Ryan C. Smith

To be a top notch photographer you have to get creative. Forget about using photoshop, try to use your camera so you don’t have to spend time at home post processing. I hear it all the time, we’ll just fix this in post. For me that’s not an option. You’ve spent a hefty investment on your camera so it can do the things you want it to do. Try different things with it and see what kind of effects you can achieve.

For this article, I will show you how to capture motion in objects we see everyday. How about cars. They drive past us everyday. You can go out on your front lawn and practice taking pictures of cars as they go by. It’s free and you can just delete the bad pictures.

Drift Car with no motion - F10, ISO 400, 1/1250 sec

As you can see the car looks like it’s still. It could be parked. The wheels show no motion at all or very little.

 

As you can see in the picture above there really isn’t too much motion. The camera was probably on sports mode which will use a very fast shutter frame to freeze the motion of something fast.

Drift Cars showing Motion - F5, ISO 400, 1/50th Sec

Now you can see there is motion in this picture. The background is a bit blurred, the wheels are blurred, it makes the picture look alive. We achieve this effect by using a slow shutter speed. The shutter opens and closes much more slowly than when it’s in sports mode.

It’s hard to imagine because it happens so fast. Your camera lets light onto the sensor for a specific amount of time. 1/2000 means that shutter opens and closes in 2000th of a 2nd. 1/60th means it opens and closes in a 60th of a second. You can imagine if your running full speed, the time it takes to jump 2 inches, or 6 inches. Not much time at all. 2 inches is much shorter than 6 inches though.

Panning

In the photography world there is something called panning. It’s where if an object is going by you, you set your camera on burst mode. The mode where it will continuously take pictures. Like my Canon 7D does 7 frames per second. When the car is driving by you focus on it while it’s a bit far away and then start shooting. As you shoot move your camera the same speed as the car is driving by. This is called panning.

Slow Shutter Speed

To Grab that motion start with a slow shutter speed of like 1/120th of a second. Then pan as the car comes your way. It takes practice but once you get it down you’ll be able to make cars look like space ships. Don’t worry about getting blurry pictures because everyone gets them and these are called “throw away’s”. Start at 1/120th of a second and then as you get better work your way down. As you practice more it things get easier.

Monopod

I’ve found that the best tool to help panning pictures is to use a monopod. A monopod helps add stability to your camera and allows for the most flexibility when panning. I use a Rocketfish Tripod from Best Buy. It’s a little pricey at $99 but I found it to be one of the best ones I’ve used.

The End Results

Here are some pictures I took with my Mono-pod with cars driving down the street. With my Monopod I was able to get down to 1/20th of a second which is insanely slow.

Showing the Motion - F22, ISO 400, 1/20th sec

Showing the Motion - F22, ISO 400, 1/20th sec

Showing the Motion - F22, ISO 400, 1/20th sec