In motion

This past weekend, I needed to shoot photos showing motion for an assignment in a course I'm taking. I was not allowed to use flash which pretty much required that the shots be done outside. In the winter in New England, outdoor motion photography is hard to come by except on the ski slopes so that's where I headed with the camera.

There are two primary ways to illustrate motion in a photo and I had the option of submitting either or both for my assignment. It was an exceedingly bright day making it difficult to tell whether I was getting anything usable while we were still on the mountain so I made a number of shots with each technique and planned to sort out my submission once I got the images back to the computer. I ended up with some good examples of both techniques and submitted one of each.

The first technique is referred to as "stop motion" or "stop action". It involves using a very fast shutter speed to freeze everything in the frame. In order for this technique to work, the subject has to be caught in a position that isn't physically possible when at rest. As luck would have it, my first shot on the mountain was the best of the "stop action" shots and is the one I submitted.

200mm, ISO 200, f/5.6, 1/2000 © Richard Critz

The glare from the snow and not being able to use my goggles with the viewfinder made tracking him to guarantee that the camera focused a serious challenge and I was essentially shooting half-blind. While I would like to have caught more of his skis while he was airborne and would have liked to have the critical focus be on his eyes instead of the tips of his skis, I think this shot succeeds quite well at capturing motion.


Once the race course opened, we moved there for the rest of the shoot. I got a few more stop action shots on the course but, in general, I feel that the second technique worked better there, as we'll see in a minute. Nonetheless, I thought this next shot was a good "second place" stop action shot.

80mm, ISO 200, f/5, 1/2000 © Richard Critz

For all of the shots on the race course, I had the camera set for continuous focus in an effort to get it to track the skiers as they approached my position. I tried shots both with and without the 3D predictive focusing feature turned on. I believe the overall reflectivity of the scene gave the autofocus system fits, and especially with the 3D tracking on, it did a lot of hunting between autofocus points. In fact, none of the 3D tracked shots were usable. As I write this, I find myself wondering if perhaps I would have had more luck going to the opposite end of the scale and using the 9-point area focus or even spot focus. I will file that away to try next time.

The second common technique for showing motion requires blurring either the background or the moving object. I didn't think having the skiers blurred against a sharp background would be all that interesting (in part because they wouldn't be recognizable as skiers) so I opted to use a technique called "panning" to keep the skiers relatively sharp while blurring the background. Panning involves shooting at a relatively slow shutter speed while moving the camera smoothly to keep the subject in the frame.

My first attempt came out reasonably well but is, to my eye, too wide a shot to be particularly interesting: too much background, not enough skier.

46mm, ISO 200, f/29, 1/60 © Richard Critz

With all of these shots at 1/60 of second shutter speed, I was right on the hairy edge of overexposure due to the lens being unable to close down enough. I got no blown out highlights but several were VERY close to the limit. Again, as I write this, it strikes me that I could probably have shot these a 1/125 and still gotten good motion blur while buying myself a full stop of headroom on the aperture.

My "runner up" shot is much more closely framed and, as a result, more interesting to me. It also gives equal time to my #2 "photo monkey". The focus is a little soft throughout (except for his right elbow) which is why it only made "runner up" status.

120mm, ISO 200, f/36, 1/60 © Richard Critz

The frame I picked to submit goes back to "photo monkey #1", again framed fairly tightly, and with more of him in sharp focus.

130mm, ISO 200, f/25, 1/60 © Richard Critz