Motion is yet-another way to convey the story in your photo. There are tons of ways to introduce it into your frame. Here are a few of my favorites.
When you think about photography vs. video, the one thing you have working against you constantly as a photographer is that the thousands of dollars of gear in your hands exist solely for the purpose of freezing motion. Not exactly setting you up for success if you need to convey motion. There are, however, a few tried and true ways to do this and below are a few of my go-to methods.
Method One: Slow down your shutter. A lot.
This is a no-brainer at weddings. When the groom decides to come up on stage to sing a Louie Armstrong tune with the band, you want to “drag” your shutter. In the photo below, I brought my shutter down to 1/5th of a second. This does 2 really wonderful things: First, it allows blur everywhere except where my flash popped. Remember, your flash is hitting the subject at like 1/1000th of a second while your shutter is open for 1/5th of a second. This largely freezes my subject but allows the rest of the scene to “marinate” in the ambient light. That brings me to the second wonderful thing: See all the green light? That’s the ambient lighting that was shining on the band, mixed in with a flash that I had red gelled and clamped to a stand on the stage. The important thing is to slow down your shutter so you can get your ambient as well as show the motion of our singer. Check out the motion trails on the groom’s hands. That’s because my flash is in rear curtain mode. I’ll explain that in a bit…it’s critical at slow shutter speeds.
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Drag your shutter to show ambient light
Method Two: Spin the camera while you snap the shutter.
This one takes practice, and it doesn’t always work, but when it does, it’s cool. I wish I could tell you I thought of this, but I learned it from Joe McNally, along with just about everything else I know about the language of light and photography. Basically, you put the camera to your eye with it oriented in portrait mode, then, when you click the shutter, you rotate the camera to landscape mode while the shutter is open. Once again the shutter needs to “drag” pretty slowly in order to have time to create the motion. Once again the flash hits the subjects in rear curtain mode, keeping them and the cake reasonably sharp while all my lights in the room including the candles on the table become streaks of light. In this case, there was a lot of background competing with my subject, and this trick is a cool way to soften everything in your background when the conditions are right.
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Want to show motion? Spin your camera!
Method Three: Spin around your subjects.
This trick works great when people end up in a circle on the dance floor. Once again, you need to be at a slow shutter speed (I shot this at 1/8th of a second). Get in the MIDDLE of the circle. Start spinning around in the opposite direction that your dancers are moving in to really get the blur. Then, just burst your camera. You’ll need a flash that can recycle really fast to get light on the subjects. Notice my light trails make a really cool background and my flash hits the subjects hard, sharpening them while also showing that they are dancing. Simple trick, really cool way to do something other than the run-of-the-mill dance shots you usually see at weddings…
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Spin around in a circle while bursting your flash!
A word about Rear Curtain flash.
Once again, this was Joe McNally’s wisdom from his book, “The Moment it Clicks.” I have found it, however, to be a critical component of good flash photography, and, like Joe, I have placed all my cameras in rear-curtain mode and have left them that way ever since.
By default, your camera is set to front curtain, which means your flash fires at the beginning of the exposure, when the shutter opens. Rear curtain allows your flash to fire at the end of your exposure, just before the shutter closes. This setting doesn’t matter much when you are shooting at, say, 1/60th of a second, but it REALLY starts to matter at the slow shutter speeds I use at weddings, especially during the tossing of the bouquet, the garter, and people dancing. Here’s why:
Remember what your flash does. It hits your subject with light and “freezes” them in the frame. If your flash goes off at the beginning of the exposure, you’ll freeze your subject and all of the movement for the rest of the exposure will take place in front of the subject. That’s not where motion would naturally occur. It also makes your flash photography look a lot like the photos taken at the Department of Motor Vehicles…which isn’t exactly flattering light…
Now, if your flash goes off at the end of the exposure, the blur comes first and then KAPOW! You freeze your subject at the end making it sharp with all the blur “in background” of your frozen subject, just where it should be.
That’s an important lesson, and if you haven’t switched your camera into rear curtain mode, go do it right now…the pictures in this post would have largely failed if I had my flash set to front curtain. Especially at these slow shutter speeds.
Well, that’s all for now! Let me know what you think and happy shooting!
