Yesterday’s Shutter Speed #2 not only dealt with stopping action, it also concerned keeping backgrounds in focus to help explain context and location.
It was important in yesterday’s photo to keep the background sharp to place the racers in a small town business district setting. Part of the charm of the photo was the building facades. Using a narrow depth of field or blurred action would have removed that element but changed the message of the photo.
Sometimes creating a motion blur is a better way to tell the story.
Today’s photo has several elements that make it interesting.
The shutter speed is set to 1/40th of a second. That is a low setting for blurred action because , depending upon movement and travel direction of the subject, the blur may be too great to have a point of focus in the frame.
While shooting a Walking Westerville piece I saw this bicyclist traveling at a moderate speed down the shallow incline of the recently reworked brick street.
I had only a few seconds to set the exposure and select a shutter speed that would blur the background sufficiently to remove the distraction of details. All I wanted were shapes that would help define location and not be sharp enough to distract from the rider’s movement.
I set the f-stop to f22 using Aperture Priority. The shutter speed indicator showed 1/40th of a second. I had run out of time to change to Shutter Priority, manual or adjust the exposure compensation to bring the shutter speed closer to 1/125th of a second.
The three frames I fired of his travels show him coming, going and the one you see here at f22, 1/40th of a second.
The background has lateral motion blur although he is not as sharp as I would have liked. Some of the comes from the fact this with the Nikon 14-24mm f2.8 lens set at 14mm. Notice how the foreground bricks have an arc to them. That’s because their location in the frame changed as their distance from the shutter plane didn’t.
The bricks at the far left remained the same distance from my camera. Their location in the frame changed. The circular motion of the camera created a similar arc within their movement during the exposure.
A close look at the tires on the bike show a similar stretching although not as exaggerated.
The siding on the houses in the background are also arced but the opposite direction from the bricks because they are at the top of the frame.
The effect resembles lens pincushion distortion that would be normally be removed in Photoshop. In this case it’s kept for effect. The arcing lines draw interest to the center of the frame and the primary subject.
