Camera | Framing My Focus

I have always loved the concept of artistically capturing motion in photos, however most often, the movement along with my automatic camera’s shutter speed just came out as a blurry, indistinguishable mess.

I still have some old attempts at motion images and they are so old now that I can’t even remember what the subject was supposed to be. Was that green blur based on plants or a car? And the brown photo? Was that a dog, cat, or some brown leaves blowing in the wind? I look back and laugh (or cry) at some of the attempts.

It turns out that all I really needed was a better camera and a better understanding of shutter speed and how to use it…and maybe a little luck!

Recently, I caught two really great motion pics – a bit by mistake – if I’m being honest here. I was playing around with the manual settings on my Nikon and was experimenting with them to see how I could get some great shots. The first one (below) is the spinning motion of my son twirling a dandelion in between his fingers. You can see that his arm is mostly in focus but the dandelion is clearly in motion with the dandelion snow blurred a bit from it. I expected to see the dandelion snow frozen in time, perfectly in focus, but bent over from the motion. I love this pic even though the end result was not what I was originally going for!

The second pic was taken this afternoon, while I was taking macro shots without a macro lens of a rose with some daisies in a small vase. I was trying to focus on the rose while having the daisies blurred in the background just providing color and texture behind the rose. I did get one pretty decent shot, but that’s not what this post is about. This post is about capturing motion. And the picture below is a perfectly, accidentally timed picture of the rose falling out of the vase. I love that you can still tell it’s a rose and that the colors behind it are so vibrant. But it is also very clearly in motion. Had I not already been taking the photo (while I thought it was NOT in motion), I would never have gotten this shot.

I love when my photography accidents are beautiful while providing important lessons. And in this case, I finally proved that with the right camera and some luck, I can get some good motion shots! Next time I will be trying to get motion pictures on purpose…maybe.

So, now I’ve had my new camera for a few days and it has some really great features and a few really fun things that can be done with it. I have always loved limited color photos, where one or two colors are highlighted and everything else is in grays. I tried getting that effect in software editing many times and so often it comes out with too many “bleed” points. So if my primary color was red, too many areas that were some variant of red got lost or something that shouldn’t read as red becomes red due to the lighting. This new camera allows me to do exactly that. It’s called a “selective color effect” and it allows me to choose up to 3 colors (and possibly a couple of ranges of colors for each color) to focus on and the rest becomes gray. It also shows me the preview of what my picture will look like before I take it, so I can change the color slightly if something is missing from my color range.

It’s tough to do when taking spontaneous pics of my son, but it works beautifully on nature. My dandelion header was taken using that effect. I love juxtaposing the concept that a dandelion is just a weed with the fact that it stands out so beautifully in that image against the greyscale leaves beneath it.

Here is a pic that I didn’t adjust the color range on correctly and got half gray and half green leaves. It was not the desired effect, but it looked cool, so I took the pic!

Another thing that I love about my new camera is not really a special effect, it’s just something that I was never able to do with my automatic cameras. Night Photography! I love nighttime and the way everything looks so different and almost magical. To be able to capture that on film is wonderful and I was able to get a few images, though to do a better job, I’ll need to pull out the tripod! Below is last night’s moon behind the trees (around 9 or 10pm).