Photographing movement: Shutter speeds

Shutter speed is quite a difficult thing to judge, at least I thought so, as it depends on the speed of the object you are shooting, your position to it, the light, and if there is more than one thing moving in a shot at different speeds. I chose a spot on a bridge over the A3 to try and practice using shutter speeds on moving objects; there would definitely be no shortage of cars passing below, I even had a few wave at me!

So to start I took a few pictures at a fast shutter speed of 1/200 secs, as shown in the first image. This froze the scene and the cars below easily keeping everything in focus. I played around with how slow I could take a shot whilst keeping the image sharply frozen, and found the below image taken at 1/80 secs to be the slowest, although there is still a portion of it that is blurred. This was due to the angle of the shot, and the fact that the speed of the cars as they came towards me increased. The closer an object is to you, the faster it appears to move. The cars in the background appeared to move slower so they were captured as though they were frozen, where as the black Audi in the front move faster the closer it gets, so it is the only one in the shot with slight movement involved.

The next image was the slowest shutter speed I took from this angle at 1.8 secs. Any slower than this let too much light into the lense and my camera insisted it didn't like it! I like the way this speed capture the lights on the car streaking past. Using a slightly faster shutter speed would have produced less streaking and kept more of the physical shape of the car intact. This is more apparent in the cars in the background, with the one closest having more blurred movement than the one just creeping into the image at the top. So choosing the correct speed is essential to achieving the right effect for your shot, although this may take some practice and a few goes before you get it right. unfortunately not all shots will wait around for you to get your camera settings right!

For comparison I took some extra shots at a slightly different angle and zoomed in so that the cars were passing directly below me. I took one picture at the same slowest speed that froze the image before, but as the traffic was moving much faster from this angle, around 50-70 mph, it produced the following result:

The image is no longer in focus due to its increased speed, but results in quite a pleasing amount of blur to suggest the movement of the vehicle. It will be important to me to practice with shutter speeds so that in time I will be able to judge what shutter speed I need to use in conjuction with the speed of the object to produce exactly the image I had envisioned.

I took one more shot at the slowest speed my camera would allow of 1/8 secs:

The car that passed through this shot becomes like a ghostly blur, and produces a very interesting effect!