Using Your Digital Camera To Capture Objects In Motion

By Author: Jack Church
Total Articles: 158
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The Digltal SLR can be used to capture moving objects in a still digital photo. For example you can capture and convey the feeling of a moving car or a person running. Here are some tips for how to achieve that.

All of us have mistakenly capture motion in a digital photo. In most cases the result was not what we wanted a burry useless digital photo. Learning to control such blurriness is the exact skill you will need in order to capture digital photos that are of high quality but also capture the feeling of a moving object.

The main technique for capturing a moving object is controlling the shutter speed. We all know by experience that when the shutter speed is too slow and the objects in the photo are moving the digital photo ends up being blurry. Or when taking digital photos of a sport event with fast moving object the shutter speed should be set to high in order to achieve crisp sharp photos.

When you want to capture the feeling of movement in a digital photo you can take advantage of the control over the shutter speed. Setting the shutter speed to the right value will result in a digital photo that ...
... is just a bit blurry to convey the movement but is still sharp enough to be useful and of high quality.

Another important factor when taking digital photos that capture movement is the fact that while the object is moving the background is not. This can help further convey the feeling of motion by either blurring just the moving object or just the background. For example assume that you need to take a digital photo of a runner. You want the digital photo to convey the fact that the runner is moving or in other words you want the viewer to immediately realize that he is looking at a digital photo of a runner while running.

There are two options to achieve just that. One is to blur the runner. Set the Digltal SLR shutter speed to the right value that will blur the runner just a bit. Hold the camera steady preferably on a tripod to make sure that the camera does not move and the background is still and sharp. The Digltal SLR allows manual setting of the shutter speed. Take advantage of that. Knowing the right value is hard at first and requires experimenting. After some experiments you will already have a feeling for what shutter speed is right for what purpose. Also there is a large range of shutter speed settings that can be used it all depends on how much blurriness you are looking for.

The other option is to freeze the runner but blur the background. This is much harder to achieve. The technique to doing that is to set the Digltal SLR shutter speed to the right one to achieve the amount of blurriness wanted and to pan the camera at the exact same speed as the runner is running at. The result will be that the runner will stay on the same area of the camera sensor while the background will be moving and blurry. Jack Church writes more on digital cameras - digital slrs