At Speed

There are many ways to provide the sense of motion in an image: blur via panning, implied motion and actually capturing a vehicle in motion. The later is my favourite and what I plan on spending more time perfecting. It does require some investment in time and gear, but there is nothing like it when comparing the end results.

Earlier last week, Dave Smith and I got together late on Sunday night. My goal was to capture Dave and his M3 driving through the lit downtown core of Ottawa. It turns out that even at 11:30 pm on a Sunday night, there are a lot of other cars around. On the hunt for emptier, and smoother roads (the downtown core is incredibly bumpy), we wound up on Sussex: beautifully smooth roads, 4 lanes wide and empty of other traffic. Well, empty except for the RCMP who were curious why we kept passing the Prime Ministers residence. Nice gentlemen, who were truly curious.

Even though we’d tightened the camera and rig down as much as possible, the bumpy downtown streets still shook both my car and Dave’s car. As a result, the majority of the downtown shots had undesirable shake or blur. Sometimes it made for an interesting shot, but I tossed the majority as not acceptable. The last shot in this trio was shot in the downtown core. Sussex on the other hand, resulted in the majority of keepers.

So, what can I do to make even better motion shots? The downtown and sussex shots were done at 40-50 km/h requiring shutter speeds as slow as 1 second. That’s a lot of time to bounce over pot holes, veer around parked cars, spread out as far as possible, maintain a constant speed and distance from Dave all while ensuring that the camera was taking photos: I use a remote trigger to activate the shutter, but you still need to control when the photo is taken. Our next steps will be on smoother and wider roads at higher speeds: that will allow for shorter shutter speeds or longer blur. Keeping it all within the speed limits is not really a challenge, as there is quite the variety of roads in and around Ottawa. I’ll also be experimenting with a flash or two to help highlight the subject. Should be fun.

Oh and the next shoot will be really early in the morning too. Sigh.