Create your own motion

So you took a photo of the car, but it looks boring like this:

You want to make the car look like it's moving, but you have no friends to either handle the camera while you drive or drive the car for you as you know you're the better photographer. However you do own Photoshop...

Select the car with a lasso or other freehand selection tool, and apply some motion blur:

This looks kinda weird for two reasons:

1. You can see through the windows and nothing is "moving" here.
2. The tires are not rotating

So add the windows into the original selection to make sure what you see through the windows moves along with the rest of the background. For the tires, simply select them and apply radial blur.

et voilá, your car is moving. OK there is a third reason it still looks weird, there's no driver... who needs that level of reality anyway.

Movement, Friend or Foe?

Photography has is historically a very still-standing affair. Using tripods, wide aperture & pleading with models to please be as still as possible. Most photographers consider a blurry image to be a bad photo, and I guess in a lot of cases this is true.

But then there is also so much fun to be had with either a moving world, or a moving camera, or both...

There are several techniques:

Tracking from a car moving at 40mph.

Camera in hand and tracking the subject.

 

Standing still holding camera against body and letting people walk past

Camera on the hand rail of one of those automatic walk ways. Waiting for someone who walks at approximately the same speed.

Standing on that same moving walk way aiming camera to a mirrored sealing with lights that change color between white, yellow orange and red...

To those paying attention, the last two shots I used to generate the composite that is the title of this blog...

This can be a somewhat frustrating experience. For every shot I like there tend to be about 25 that don't work. But the dynamic content of the photos are worth the patience.

Next step is a little more risky... camera tossing... For those of you who have never heard of this: it is what is sounds like. You throw your camera in air, and usually with a delay timer or long exposure allow it to take a picture mid air. In true photographers style there is a Flickr group dedicated to this phenomenon: http://www.flickr.com/groups/cameratoss/

Watch this space...