There was a post on Surfer Magazine’s photo blog by Rob Gilley a few weeks back which I bookmarked to take a look at later, it’s about speed blur shots, you might have also heard them referred to as panning shots, because usually you’re panning the camera at the same speed as the surfer and using a slow shutter speed to create the blur effect in the water.
I have to agree with the assessment of the example photo’s by the Surf Images blog, none of them seem to capture what Rob is going for in the text, but maybe that’s his point, that it’s so hard to get this type of shot right that he didn’t get any really good examples during the session?
I’m sure you’ve seen an effective one too—a speed blur of a running cheetah with its legs in motion and its upper body steady is a long standing visual cliché.
I’ve only tried a few, it’s pretty rare that I take a tripod to the beach and even rarer that I decide to try something like this out, my most successful surf shot is probably this one of Ben Poole from Supertubos in Portugal:
It was early morning and I specifically wanted to try a few panning shots, I had the Canon 70-200mm f4 set up in shutter priority so I could concentrate on adjusting the shutter speed to see what looked best, with this one at 1/60 I managed to get the speed of the pan right so that Ben’s sharp, with a slow enough shutter to blur the rest of the wave, I’d have preferred to have more blur in the background but with a longer shutter speed comes more risk of making the subject blurry too.
Here’s one from earlier in the session of James Sutton with a shutter speed of 1/4 of a second:
As you can see it’s a lot blurrier and James isn’t crisp by any means, but it captures the movement in the foreground and the wave nicely, I converted to black and white because the sun was a long way from up so the colours were very flat anyway.
Top Tip – Practice Away From the Beach
One thing I have tried a bit since these shots were taken in May this year is practising this technique on traffic, I got some good opportunities on a trip to Rome this year when they happened to have a Harley Davidson rally going on for the weekend I was there.
This one’s hand held, you just have to frame the photo and keep moving the camera so that the subject remains in the same place in the frame, the background will then become a blur, you can spend 15 minutes at an intersection in a city like Rome and take a few hundred shots of passing bikes, trams and cars and you’ll see an improvement in your results for sure.
At some point I’ll have my tripod handy at the beach again and I’ll try out some more of these shots.