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Why show motion blur?Version 1.0, © 2007 by Dale Cotton, all rights reserved A good friend, correspondent, and fellow art photographer recently asked: "I've been looking at your "SloMo" shots. Initially, I was not drawn to them, and am still not sure – however, there's something there I can't define which is intriguing me – so how about an explanation of what you were aiming to achieve?" Well, you gotta know, as a long-standing photo forum blabbermouth, I couldn't resist responding to a question like that... My first PC had a clock speed of 4.77 MHz. My current one is up near 4 GHz. I've often wondered what it would be like to experience vibrations of that frequency. Generally, the faster something happens the more stress it induces: mellow vs. uptight. Cruising at highway speeds vs. driving in a Formula One race. Riding a rollercoaster vs. riding a ferris wheel.
Fig. 2: EEG plot Our brains have something akin to clock speed, as recorded in the familiar alpha, beta, etc. waves of an EEG. When I look at the world with my 20/20 glasses on, my brain immediately goes into its standard cruise mode, it revs up to operating speed, characterized by a certain EEG plot. When I sit back and take off my glasses, letting myopia rule the day, I can immediately sense a mellowing out, a reduction in the workload going on inside my cranium, characterized by a different, more leisurely EEG plot. This is because there is simply less visual information there for those little grey cells to crunch (although that can have the opposite effect and induce stress, instead of reducing it, if one has a sense of danger lurking).
Fig. 3: Alfred Sisley, Lane Near a Small Town A pet theory of mine is that a major appeal of impressionism and similar painting styles is just this reduction in brainload, resulting in a mellower mental state, resulting in a favourable impression of the picture. Photography does not generally get to benefit from this approach, because crisp 20/20 detail has long ruled the day. After all: what is a camera good for, if not to capture the minute detail that painting struggles to achieve? But there is an alternate answer to that presumably rhetorical question. Yes: the camera can freeze the world in its tracks to grant us a highly detailed snapshot of a moment in time. Ironically, in many situations this strength can be photography's greatest weakness. Try taking a picture of those Formula One racers whizzing by. If you use a fast shutter and freeze all motion - yep: you get good detail; but you also squeeze any sense of motion and excitement from the frame. The race cars may as well be parked there right on the track or road, for all we can tell from such a picture.
Fig. 4: Blue Car ©2001 by Karen Ball A friend of mine used to make a good fraction of her living doing race track photography and quickly learned that one "secret" of success is to use a slower shutter but pan the camera in order to get good detail in car and driver while also getting motion blur in the wheels and background to provide some sense of motion and energy (see Fig. 4). Similar formulas exist for other types of sports photography. And, however useful motion blur may be for showing action, it also reduces detail and so should serve to mellow our fevered EEG plots. Digging a bit deeper, we can say that motion blur gives the camera a new way of relating to time beyond simply freezing the millisecond. Motion blur is not entirely alien to our native visual experience, but with a camera (and especially with a digital camera) we can systematically exploit this capability. So two reasons why we might want to exploit motion blur instead of eliminate it are to induce mellowness and, antithetically, to imply speed/energy. Digging a bit deeper, motion blur opens up a new world of visual experiences. If been-there-done-that is an inevitable consequence of aging, at least motion blur photography gives our jaded, world a-weary eyes something new to gaze upon. Of course, newness is not in itself necessarily equal to goodness. A grub's eye view of the interior of a garbage can may be a new visual experience, but it is far from guaranteed to be a pleasing one. Instead, it takes equal effort from both artist and viewer to sift through all the possible motion blur effects one can achieve from a given scene to come up with something desirable:
Fig. 5: Motion blur? yes. Desirable? your call...
Fig. 6: Same question Which returns us to the realm of purely aesthetic considerations. For the impressionist painter impressionism has the operational advantage of allowing her to paint from nature in something a tad closer to real time than the months it takes to create a single photo-realist extravaganza. The aesthetic advantage is partly the mellowness induction already mentioned. But another aesthetic advantage is that abstraction reduces the clutter of endless fine detail which in turn strengthens and emphasizes the dynamics of a given composition. While yet another aesthetic advantage to detail reduction is the increase in lyricality that derives from a more graceful meta-texture (poetry rather than prose). These points simply add up to motion blur being to photography what impressionist technique is to painting (another photographic candidate being soft focus.) For a certain type of picture, however, the make/break question is whether a given technique enhances or detracts from the picture's ability to tell its story (however non-verbal that may be). If we look here, for example... ...my intent was not just to show a group of individuals in a familiar situation (birthday party) but also to induce the emotional response I want the viewer to experience both for the scene as a whole and for each of the individuals within it. Of course I have colour, contrast, shape, and line to work with, but the delicacy and emotional sensitivity of the various degrees of motion blur in this composition are welcome additions to my toolbox. I hope my response so far doesn't sound as though I have any idea that I invented or have a patent on motion blur photography. Great examples can be found going back 150 years. It's simply that digital capture, with its instant feedback, gives us so much more freedom to experiment that we can now begin to really learn how to exploit this capability. Further viewing: My own stuff: Show-Mo Snaps and Now What?. Other folk's: Robert Wasinger and Joy Goldkind (with some reluctance as to content – not technique! – since I'm a family type of guy).
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