Tag: motion blur

This is my contribution to the Lens-Artists Photo Challenge: Old and New.

I thought it was an interesting prompt and had several ideas for a post. I had my first choice partly planned out in my head and then forgot about the plan and took the wrong lens when I went for a walk with the camera on Sunday morning.

Then on Sunday evening I set up a camera in the yard hoping for some colourful clouds at sunset. There wasn’t much colour at sunset but as I had the camera set up I started using the auto composite setting to record the clouds moving across the sky.

That’s when I started thinking about some of the old techniques for showing movement in a photograph. That led to me thinking about photographic techniques and how some are the same and how some have changed dramatically.

The late 1980s in Cheshire, England. A male Common Blackbird checking on the photographer lying in the grass.

30 years later I’m still lying in the grass and birds are still checking me out. A male Red-breasted Nuthatch on the South Bruce Peninsula, Ontario, Canada.

The early 1980s and I’m on a roof in North London at dusk turning the lights of the city into streaks by zooming the lens during exposure.

Nearly 40 years later and the digital camera I am using has an auto composite setting. This photo was a base exposure of 1 second and a further 120 x 1 second exposures to show the movement of the clouds at dusk.

Edit: On Googling auto composite I discovered that Olympus call it live composite. Probably because you can watch the image building as the exposures continue.