Ahhh yes, back to the basics–how can you expect to really cook if you can’t boil water?
Thanks to digital camera’s LCD screens unexpected blurry pictures are a thing of the past. ‘Shoot, check, adjust’ (if necessary)– has become the mantra of many a photographer in the ‘digital age’.
The upshot of digital is that, thanks to the LCD preview, you can see right away when you’ve shot a blurry photo and that’s good. But do you know why the picture is blurry? Do you know what to do to prevent blur? If your answer is no– fear not, you will.
Pictures can be blurry due to 2 common issues, subject motion blur and camera shutter speed blur. (There are other resons, depth of field, intentional post processing effects– we can cover those another time, as they’re usually more ‘intentional’.)
- Subject motion blur is easy to understand, think: Formula 1 Race car screaming by you at 180MPH. Regardless of the shutter speed you use, you’re going to get a little blur simply because the subject is moving so fast.
- Camera shutter speed blur isn’t too difficult to figure out either, basically, the slower your shutter speed, the more likely your trembling hands are going to shake the camera. You shake the camera, your picture gets blurry.
So, to recap, fast subject = blurry, and slow camera = blurry. Simple right? How about a few examples?
First up, Subject motion blur, or the F1 race car shot:
The blurry car is a fast moving subject. Assuming that your intent was to have the vehicle sharp you have 2 pretty obvious options:
Shoot with a higher shutter speed to try to ‘freeze’ the car in place
Shoot with a lower shutter speed and ‘pan’ (follow the motion of the car with) your camera– by shooting at a lower shutter speed, you’ll blur the rest of the scene, but by panning at the same relative speed as the car, you’ll get the car in focus
Next, camera shutter speed/camera shake or the ’shaky hands’ shot:
The solution here is pretty simple
Shoot at a higher shutter speed, using your focal lenght as a bare minimum shutter speed. In other words, if you’re shooting with a 50mm lens, try to use a shutter speed of 1/50th or higher. If you’re shooting with a 200mm lens, then try 1/200th or higher– more zoom you use, the more shake you’ll see…
- Use a tripod to steady the camera
- Use a flash, to freeze the action
The higher shutter speed will help reduce visibility of the shake, as will the tripod. The flash (if you use one) will ‘freeze’ the lit part of the photo in place, as well as provide additional light to allow you to use a higher shutter speed. In the end, you have any number of options to address camera blur.
So there you have it, subject motion blur and camera shake blur. Neither issues are bad– you might even intentionally use them– but now you know the why they occur and how to address them.
We’ll cover depth of field blur, and post processing blur once we get a few more basics out of the way…