July 2025, Capturing Still Motion

News about happenings at Deliberate Light and photography instruction (see Digital Photo Academy). My views on this month’s photography topic: Capturing Still Motion.

NEWS

Upcoming Workshops. I am next scheduled to teach workshops for Digital Photo Academy on October 4th at Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia. You can sign up here if interested.

· Mastering Your Camera Controls (1.5 hours) – intended for DSLR/Mirrorless/Compact cameras (smartphone tutorial available separately)

· Composition in the Field (3 hours) – walking tour around the venue with instruction and hands-on practice composing photos (bring any camera)

New Photo.

Vernon Run Morning. The woods across the creek glow as the day brightens. It is a good time to be out and about if you want to find beauty in wakening nature. The warming day releases the earthy smells of burgeoning trees and undergrowth with slow running water. The birds have long since begun their day, noisy with their seeking. But even so, the stillness is what strikes me most, the stillness that I seek. Still.

(Rose Valley, PA 2019)

For a more detailed, enlarged view and to get it printed, see it on my website.

VIEWS

Capturing Still Motion

Let’s talk about ways to capture motion in your still pictures. Obviously, video is a way to capture movement, but how do you imply or represent motion in a still picture? How do you convey the impression of motion without resorting to video.

One straightforward way to suggest motion is putting the subject in a position where movement is anticipated by the viewer, that is, freezing motion.

We know that this guy is not suspended in the air but in the process of coming down – his motion is implied by his position. This only requires a fast hand at finding the shutter button and sufficient light that the shutter speed can be fast enough to stop action. To avoid having to be perfect in the timing of your shot, set your camera to a Continuous Mode so that a single button press captures a series of shots in fast sequence.

Another way to suggest motion is creative use of selective blurring. For example, in landscape photography, some parts of the view may be moving while others are stationary:a view of a mountain with clouds moving overhead, or traffic flowing through a city street with surrounding buildings, or a rapidly flowing waterfall surrounded by rocks and trees.

To get this image, I had to use a slow shutter speed (25 seconds) which required that I compensate with a low ISO and large aperture in order to prevent the image from being blown-out bright. At that speed, I had to use a tripod or the rocks in the image would have been blurry too. Because rocks do not move, they are clearly in-focus, while the flowing water blurs to look softly wispy. This image was taken with a regular camera where shutter speed, aperture and ISO can be directly controlled and dark filters can be used on lenses. That effect can be replicated to some extent in a cellphone camera app using, for instance, the Long Exposure option in Google Camera or Live Photos in iPhone Camera.

Generally speaking, the longer the exposure, the softer and blurrier the moving parts of the image become. With clouds, for example, it is important to get very long exposures with a camera on a tripod because clouds move so slowly. Regular cameras provide a great deal of flexibility regarding controlling shutter speed. Cellphones are more limited in that regard.

This approach can have odd effects. For example, in this 1-second exposure in a train station, parts of some walking people are blurred out to the point they disappear, leaving disembodied feet and vague wavy lines in the image. On second thought, not just odd, also kind of fun.

This suggests a technique for eliminating moving traffic from a scene: use a long enough exposure that people or vehicles in the scene completely disappear. This can make a busy city street look almost deserted.

Panning is another form of capturing a sense of motion in a still. The opposite of long exposures that blur out moving objects, panning tries to keep the moving object in focus while blurring out the things behind it. The technique requires that you keep the camera pointed at the moving object while taking the picture, which means the camera is moving in sync with its target. A moving vehicle is a common subject for panning.

Notice how the streaks of light in the background and the blurred wheels convey a sense of speed.

Video is often an easy option when trying to capture movement. But, consider whether video will make the best image before just reflexively using it. It may be easy but are you using video to avoid having to decide what the best picture is? Sometimes, for instance with sparkling water on a river, video really is the best, and, even when it is not, sometimes the subject is just not worth the effort to make the best still. But it is something to think about before automatically using video.

Carl Finkbeiner

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