Blur static backgrounds

Use a car-mounted rig to keep your camera rock-steady on the road

For scenes with longer exposures, it’s necessary to keep the camera completely steady while shooting. This usually means shooting on a tripod to avoid camera-shake. By keeping the Nikon still during a longer exposure, so too will be anything in the frame that is static, while anything moving is blurred. However, you can make a moving object look completely sharp while the background is blurred during a long exposure, so long as the camera is moving at the same speed and direction as the said object.

To show how this works, we’ve attached our Nikon D750 to a sports car using the Hague SM11 Telescopic Camera Suction Mount Rig (£276/$395, www. haguecamerasupports.com). By using powerful suction pads to hold a rigid metal boom onto the body panels of the car, our Nikon now moves in exact unison with the vehicle. This means that longer shutter speeds will blur any motion of the background while driving, but keep the car in sharp focus.

But it’s not as easy as rigging and driving. You’ll need specific settings to make sure the camera continuously captures shots, and perhaps a neutral density filter to block out some light if the sun is really bright in order to get a long exposure. Using a telescopic camera suction mount rig, Jason Parnell-Brookes demonstrates how you can get blurred motion using a longer shutter speed whilst rendering sharp focus on a moving vehicle