A Guide to Pleasing Blurs – Artie Morris & Denise Ippolito
Creating a pleasing photographic blur is a lot harder than what you would think, a accidentally blurred photo is usually not going to cut it. You need to be intentionally setting out to create a Blur, of course doing so is going to require a slow shutter speed often requiring the use of a ND filter to reduce the amount of light entering the lens of the camera.
Fellow photographers, Artie Morris and Denise Ippolito have just released what should become the guide of choice for how to create pleasing blurs. The book is a wealth of information and richly illustrated with a huge number of excellent examples of wonderful images. Denise and Artie explain their thinking and give full technical information on each image. They cover many different techniques including in camera and post production techniques.
It is a excellent guide on how to create a pleasing blur and is available as a digital download from www.birdsasart.com
Armed with the knowledge from the book, I set out to make some blurs. Had my trusty DS3 and 150MM Sigma macro and ND 400 Filter (10 stop light reduction) and visited the local botanical gardens, The ND400 being a 10 stop reduction filter can make it quite difficult to see through the viewfinder (Also they are quite hard to source and are limited in what size they come in) as I was shooting in quite bright harsh light though I was able to get by. The filter combined with the D3S gave me lots of options as I could increase the ISO quite a lot if required to get to the Shutter Speed I was looking for.
Here are my tips….
- Take lots of images
- Try different techniques on the same scene
- Have fun
The images in the slide show above are all of the same scene, they are all as shot (No added effects applied in Photoshop) and all have a different feel courtesy of different camera movements during the image capture. I found a effective technique was to move the camera in the directions of the dominate lines in the image, hence here the plants had a strong curved line to the leaves, so I moved the camera in a curved direction during the exposure. Likewise if the scene contains vertical lines I would move the camera vertically during the exposure.
Abstract blurs like the above can be a created from just about anything, I very nearly overlooked this scene. Blurs are artistic expression so don’t expect everyone to like any particular image, personal taste comes into play with these type images. Some people will love a image whilst others will see nothing worthwhile in the same image.
If you are a Nikon user, you have a EXTRA tool up your sleeve – Multiple Exposure Blurs!! (Not covered in the Book) I will provide a guide for creating these in the next couple of weeks.
Cya
Im – Off with the Birds!
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