FIX YOUR PIX—

Camera motion and fuzzy pictures:

Your point and shoot camera works hard to make a correctly exposed picture. As the available light lessens the camera automatically opens its aperture wider, slows the shutter speed or adds flash to achieve a correctly exposed photo.

Sometimes it does a combination of all three.

A problem arises when you always depend on the automatic function and have no awareness of your camera’s shutter speed. The speed may have slowed down to the point where the slightest camera or subject movement will blur your picture.

Let’s wrestle with definitions a bit. A fast shutter speed is one where the camera’s shutter is open only a tiny fraction of a second; say 1/500th. Naturally, the camera only records what happens during that extremely brief period of time, and, under normal circumstances not much movement occurs in that short interval.

There is not much danger of blurred images here.

Conversely, a slow shutter speed, say, 1/15th of a second, is a substantially longer interval and much motion can occur while the shutter is open. In this instance if the camera moves during the exposure the entire picture will be blurred.

If the camera is held still and the subject moves, the overall picture will be sharp but the subject will be blurred.

If the camera is panned (moves in the same direction and the same speed as the subject) the subject will be recorded fairly sharply and the background will be blurred.

In this brief explanation you can see 1) shutter speeds we do not control can cause poor pictures, or 2) shutter speeds under our control can be very powerful creative tools.

Here's how the pictures were done:

In Thursday's photo of my dance partner, the exposure was at 1/4 sec., f/14 and the camera was panned as Fran danced toward the right. All dancers moved during that exposure and the rear doorway also is blurred because the camera was intentionally moved.

In the lead photo above notice the spotlights on the ceiling are fairly sharp but there is lots of motion in the dancers; especially those travelling at right angles to the camera. The camera was held fairly still, but, the subjects moved. Exposure was 1/6 sec., f/9. All pictures were done at ISO 400.

Experimenting with very slow shutter speeds often produces interesting results as shown in the small photo inset above. While the dancers moved and the camera was hand-held during this fairly long exposure there is sufficient sharpness to lend creative legitimacy to the photo. Exposure also 1/6 sec., f/9.

In the bottom picture a slow shutter speed was used, the camera was panned and the on-board strobe was fired. Everything in the picture shows movement because of the slow shutter speed but notice particularly the hand of the dancer in the blue shirt. It is shown in sharp detail and is blurred. The short duration of the strobe recorded the sharp hand image, yet the camera still saw the hand motion during the fairly long overall exposure of 1/15th sec., and f/5.6.