Travel Blog Part 7: Improve Your Travel Photography With The Blurring Technique

Travel photographer, Andrew Newey, shares his top travel photography tips in his weekly blog. Learn about using blurring techniques to add dynamism to your travel photograph portfolio

Following on from my previous tutorial post on ‘Improving Your Travel Photography With The Panning Technique’, here is another technique which you folks really should dedicate some time to if you want to add some dynamism to your images.

I like to include a sense of movement as much as I can in my photography for various reasons. If the subject you are shooting is moving, or the scene contains something or someone that is moving, why try to freeze that movement and make it look like everything is static? Pictures with a bit of motion blur look far more realistic, dynamic and dramatic than those without. If something is moving, I’ll blur it!

Unlike the panning technique, blurring involves keeping the camera still on a tripod, so that the elements in the scene that are not moving remain sharp. Using a tripod will allow you to use a slow shutter speed to blur the moving subject, without the rest of the scene being blurry as a result of camera shake. Just like the panning, the shutter speed required to achieve a blurred effect will depend on many different factors; the amount of light available, the distance between you and the subject, the size of the subject, the speed and direction of the subject’s movement, the focal length of the lens ect..

Again, just like the panning technique, it is best to start off slowly. Experiment with blurring slow moving subjects such a water, to create that wonderful ethereal effect. Then as your confidence grows you can give the faster moving subjects a try.

Seascapes work brilliantly with some motion blur. When you shoot at the beginning and the end of the day, the light levels are so low that you have no choice but to mount the camera on a tripod and use a slow shutter speed. But you know that already, right?  A shutter speed of around 1 second or slower will give you motion blur, but you will need to experiment to achieve the desired effect. The shot above was taken using a polarising filter to increase the shutter speed to 10 seconds, which proved to be the best choice to blur the sea crashing over the rocks. Once the light levels drop low enough, you don’t need to use any filters to absorb excess light, because the shutter speed will already be slow enough.

This shot of a fisherman returning home on the Nam Song River in Laos finally came together after of a long, long wait, oh and some luck! I had chosen this vantage point day’s earlier, after trapsing up and down the river looking for the best spot. I always get to my chosen spot too early for sunrise or sunset, but if you travel to the other side of the world solely for photography, it’s best to be on the safe side! The shutter speed was 5 seconds, which blurred the water perfectly, but I knew this would be too slow to capture any passing boats. Luckily this fisherman was rowing by hand and stopped rowing momentarily to see what I was doing. This meant he slowed down enough to record the shape of him and his boat, whilst still adding some motion blur.

The shots above and below are perfect examples of how the distance between you and the subject can be a major factor in determining the shutter speed you use. The monk at Swayambu temple in Nepal was a fair distance from the camera, plus the fact I was using a wide angle lens at 24mm which made him appear even smaller in the frame. I had time to experiment with shutter speed, as he was constantly circumambulating around the stupa as part of his morning ritual. I decided that 1/15th second would be just right for the speed he was walking.

The berber drummer however was much harder to capture, due to the fact I was physically so close and had zoomed in to about 70mm. Because the suggested shutter speed was too slow for the speed of hand movement, I had to increase the ISO to 400 to increase the shutter speed to 1/6th second. Because the camera was mounted on a tripod, the drums were recorded nice and sharp, so it does not look like the whole image has suffered from camera shake.

As with the panning technique, motion blur will not suit every subject, but that is something you will learn the more you experiment. If the subject is too blurred, it will lose it’s form and become unrecognizable. This is one clear advantage of shooting digital photography, in that you can shoot and shoot until you can master the technique and simply delete the one that didn’t work.

To check out more of Andrew Newey’s photographs and advice, head over to www.travelphotography.org.uk