Blur on purpose

A little camera movement can lead to a creative in-camera effect

Modern sensors offer a level of image detail that has never been possible until now. It’s an exciting time, but images are not just made up of pixels, they’re also made of colours and shapes, and there’s something to be said for a complete lack of fine detail.

Blurring a scene with camera motion is one way to eliminate detail and reduce it to abstract smudges that give the image a painterly feel. In the shot below, tipping the camera up and down over the course of a quarter-second exposure has led to vertical blur that was more effective than the sharp version of our scene.

In some situations you may need to use a lens-mounted ND filter to block some of the light in order to achieve a shutter speed slow enough to allow for a little camera movement (see page 86). But in a shady spot like the woods here, using aperture-priority mode with a low ISO and a small aperture was enough to slow the shutter speed down sufficiently.