For our July assignment we want you to freeze a moving object or person. One of photography’s greatest appeals is its ability to capture an otherwise fleeting moment, making it available for study and appreciation. The athletes’ desperate lunge for the finish line, a glass smashing on the floor, seed heads floating on the breeze, or a friend captured mid-jump and seemingly defying gravity. Ours is a world that moves, and photography is unique in allowing us to capture the drama inherent in that movement.
The key to a successful assignment is two-fold – choice of subject, and good technique. There are less interesting subjects – cars on the road outside your house, for example – and much more interesting subjects. Use your imagination and consider the many things that move, or could be made to move, people included. Getting this right is key, and experiment. It must be clear to the viewer of the image that the thing they are looking at is moving. Someone suspended in mid-air is clearly moving, but someone sat on a rowing machine is not necessarily. It’s important to make sure your shutter speed is fast enough, which will depend on the thing you’re shooting, and how it is moving in relation to the camera. This can be trial and error, so review your shots fully zoomed in to see whether there is any blur in the subject. The simplest way to get a fast shutter speed is to open the aperture wide in Aperture Priority mode. If you need a very specific shutter speed then set it in Shutter Priority mode but be careful to make sure that there is an aperture available that is wide enough to match that shutter speed. To avoid having to shoot with too large an aperture, put your ISO up to at least 400, and even higher if you can do this without generating excessive noise in the image. Continuous shooting mode can help give you options to choose from, but if you need to be quite precise with when you fire the shutter, single shot mode is best. Focussing on moving objects can be tricky. If you know exactly where the subject will be when you shoot it, consider manual focus and pre-focus on where the subject is or will be. If the subject is moving around in many directions, get to grips with your camera’s autofocus tracking and practise with this. As with all photography, get out, shoot, see what works and what doesn’t, and understand why.
Winners of the expert and the crowd vote will each get a copy of Creative Shutter Speed: Master the Art of Motion Capture by Derek Doeffinger.
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