Transcripts
1. Introduction: When we look at photography,
there are generally a few techniques that
we all understand. We're all acquainted with and understand how they
affect a photograph. Namely, those are things like
color, light, and shape. But there are a few
techniques that we don't talk about as often, but equally as effective. One of those is motion. My name is Fa Kerry and
I am a photographer with a decade long
experience working across genres of photography
from fashion photography to live music photography and pretty much
everything in between. Of course, as well as being
a full time photographer, I also just document
my everyday life. One of my favorite
things to do is to use motion within
my photography, whether that is just my
everyday photography or whether that is client work. In today's class, we're going
to be exploring how you can use motion to
create a motion, to storytell for
advertising purposes, and the specific techniques you need to know to
make that happen. We're going to be
covering everything from frozen motion to motion blur, as well as mixing
the two together. Join me in the next lesson
as we get started in this mini class all about
motion in photography.
2. Class Project: Welcome to this class all
about motion in photography. I'm so excited to
get stuck in with you guys talking about motion. It's one of my
favorite techniques to use within photography. Like all classes
here on Skillshare, we also have a class project. So I want you to think
about this class projects as we move through the class, and at the end, you can upload your project to the
class project gallery. Where I can take a look at it. Other students on Skillshare
can also take a look at it, we can share and learn
from each other. For this class project,
the task is to produce two photographs that use
motion in different ways. Of course, we are going to be talking throughout the rest of this class about different
ways that you can use motion. So if you don't know about that quite yet, then don't worry. You can join me in
the next lesson, we're going to get
straight in talking about some of the ways that you can use motion in photography.
3. Communicating Emotion with Movement: One of my favorite ways to
use movement and motion in photography is as what we
call an emotive device, and that means essentially you're creating emotion
within an image. You use movement and
motion to appeal to our human understanding of how emotions correlate
with movement. What I mean by that is
essentially we have certain shortcuts
in our brain that help to build connotations. When it comes to movement, lots of the time, fast movement, large kind of
expressions of movement are related to quite
strong emotions, whether that be anger and
rage confusion or excitement. We often move a lot when we are experiencing quite
strong emotions. And so when you see
that within an image, it immediately links back to that understanding of
human behavior that we have. An example of this is
recently I was on tour with an artist and their
kind of brief or their ethos was to really capture the feeling of what it feels like to be in the rave, to be in that space
where you're really passionate about the music,
you're expressing yourself, and a lot of the references
that they wanted to try to emulate were based around rage and chaos and just
really strong emotions. The way that I was
able to answer that brief was to use
motion within the work. We're going to be moving on
now into the next lesson and talking about
a different way that you can use motion. But I'd really like you to
just keep in mind the idea of using motion to create emotion and how you
might want to do that. That's important
because the next lesson is about telling a story, using motion as a device. And of course, any
story is made so much better if you compare
that with emotion.
4. Telling a Story with Motion: So in this lesson, we're
going to be exploring motion as a storytelling device. So how can we use motion and movement to
progress a story, to tell a story for our
audience or our viewers? Just as in filmmaking, we can use the same
idea of advancing a scene or a story
within photography. One of the ways that
we could do that is by suggesting direction. So physically having
people moving in a certain direction, a good example of this
would be if you were doing an event photography or live music photography,
and you wanted to show people entering the venue, you would have them moving in that direction if you wanted to tell the story of
the end of the night, however, they might be
moving out of the venue. Showing some sort of
movement or motion within a photograph is a
really good way of taking your viewer from
A to B because it suggests that there is kind of a B to the A,
if that makes sense. So if your photo is A, there must be a B because
there's this movement, your subject is moving or something in this image is
moving to the next point. One way that I
quite like to show storytelling is
through a mixture of both motion blur
and frozen motion. For example, having your subject still and everything
around them moving, it creates some introspection. It creates that focal
point that tells you that that subject is the
main character of the story. Alongside emotion,
have a think about how you might want to use motion
as a storytelling device. In the next lesson, we're
going to be looking more at using motion in an
advertising sense.
5. Creating Focus for Advertising Work with Motion: This lesson, we're going
to be talking about using motion as a
device for advertising. So many of us work as a photographer because we are selling something
for our client. We're helping them
to sell something. A lot of my commercial
work is based around selling an
item of clothing, selling a product,
even selling a venue. And a lot of the
time, that kind of photography isn't
overly stylized. But it doesn't mean
that you can't use stylistic devices to achieve that kind of advertising aim. Like we explored
in the last lesson when we were talking
about storytelling, that mixture of fast
moving motion blur and frozen motion can be a really nice way to
show off a product. You have your product as the
focal point, it's frozen. Everything around it is moving. It's very clear to the
viewer what the product is. Similarly, I did
a shoot recently. It wasn't actually
an advertising shot, but you could use the same sort of technique in an
advertising shoot. Did this shoot where the model was emptying the
contents of her bag. This would be a perfect
idea of showing off a bag, showing off the
build of the bag, how much that bag holds. Aside from doing a flat lay or something that's done
time and time again, it's about finding
a creative way to advertise that product and essentially
tell that story of what that product is used for. Taking advantage of
creative devices such as motion is a great way to set your imagery aside from everything else that's
happening in that space. In the next sesson,
we're going to be diving into the idea of capturing motion and how we actually do that from a
technical point of view. We've covered why you might
want to do that or how you might want to use it in
the different shot ideas. But how do you
physically dial in those settings into your camera and make these shots happen?
6. Understanding Shutter Speed: This lesson, we're
going to be exploring the idea of shutter speed, and I'm going to be working
on the assumption that you guys are already familiar
with the exposure triangle. The exposure triangle
consists of ISO, aperture and shutter speed. If you aren't already
familiar with that, I would recommend taking 5
minutes just to get acquainted with the exposure triangle and understanding what each
one of those does. In this lesson,
we're going to be really focusing on
a shutter speed. So shutter speed
essentially refers to how long your camera is
taking an image for. If it's a slow shutter speed, then imagine your lens is going to be open for a
longer period of time. Capturing more motion. If
it's a faster shutter speed, it's going to be open
for a short amount of time just capturing
a single frame. The best way that I can describe this is a little bit
like your human eye. If you are walking
in front of me now, you're walking back
and forth in front of me and I blink really quickly, I'm just going to see
a snapshot of that. I'm going to see you
isolated in one position. Whereas if I keep my eyes open for a
longer period of time, I'm going to see you
do the whole movement. I'm going to see you go back and forth the whole way round. Shutter speed works
pretty much the same. The longer the
shutter is open for, the more image it's
going to capture. But we have to remember
that that's going to be captured on a single exposure. You're taking a photograph
and not a video. Because of this, we get
something called motion blur. We measure shutter speed in seconds and fractions
of seconds. Something like 1/600 of a second is considered
quite a fast shutter speed, whereas something like 1/6, which is one sixth of a second is considered
quite a slow shutter speed. Depending on what you're working on and what you're
trying to achieve, you can go even slower and start taking exposures that
are one, two, three, four, 5 seconds or keeping the shutter open essentially
for however long you want. In the next lesson, we're
going to be specifically talking about motion
blur and how to master.
7. How to Use Motion Blur: So in this lesson, we're going to be talking
about motion blur. And like I explained
in the last lesson, the most important thing here
is in your shutter speed. To achieve a nice motion blur, you want your shutter to be open for a long period of time. Something like 1/6 to 1/30 is usually around
where I personally work, but it does depend
on your taste, and again, as always, what it is you're
trying to achieve. But other than setting
a slow shutter speed, what else do you
need to consider? One of the things you want to consider is the actual movement. So what is it that
you're trying to blur? If it's your subject, then
you might want to consider keeping your camera on a tripod
to keep the camera still. Which will essentially isolate the entire frame apart from something that is
moving in the frame. So if I'm taking a photo now straight ahead of
me and the scene is a street where nothing else is moving apart
from the vehicles. If my camera is still, then that image is
going to be completely still apart from the vehicles
having that motion blur. However, if I took
my camera off the tripod and I
accidentally moved it, the whole image is
going to be blurry because the scene is also going
to have that motion blur. It won't just be isolated
to those vehicles. But you don't
necessarily have to put your camera on a tripod. You could also move your
camera to motion blur. This is especially great if you want to try something
called shutter panning, which is essentially
where you find a subject and you
track that subject, you move at the same
pace as the subject, track them throughout the
exposure throughout how long the shutter is open
for because you're moving at the same
pace as that subject, it's the background and
everything else around it that should be blurry
rather than the subject. I have a couple
examples of this from live music where
I've mixed the two. I've tracked the subject, had a part of them quite still, and then other parts of their bodies that are moving quicker. Being a bit more blurry. Another thing to note
is that aperture is also going to play
an effect here in terms of the size of
these light trails. If your aperture
is a lot higher, then those light trails
are going to be more refined and smaller because
your aperture is smaller. Whereas if you are wide
open on your aperture, those light trails
are going to be much larger and less defined. In the next lesson, we're
going to be jumping into how we freeze motion.
8. How to Freeze Motion: This lesson, we're going to
talk about freezing motion. We've already discussed how
we capture motion blur, but how do we capture
frozen motion? R, there are two ways
that you want to do this. One is by utilizing a
fast shutter speed, like we spoke about, the
faster your shutter speed, the quicker that exposure
is going to be you're really just going to get
a snapshot of a scene. But of course, there are
maybe some instances where you can't utilize a
fast shutter speed. Maybe the exposure won't allow you to and you're
really needing to alter your shutter speed
to allow for more light. If you can't or
you don't want to utilize a fast shutter speed, one of the things you can
do is introduce a flash. Because strobe lights, flashlights essentially
emit a really short, fast burst of light, that light is going to
freeze your subject. Both techniques can
be used in order to freeze your
subject in motion, whether they're running,
whether they're jumping, whether it's a car
moving really quickly, for example, in the next soon, we're going to be
exploring mixing the two different
motion techniques, motion blur and motion freeze.
9. Mixing Motion Blur and Frozen Motion: The final technique
that I want to explore within this mini class. I want to talk about mixing motion blur with motion freeze. We can do this very easily with something called
dragging the shutter. Essentially, to achieve this, you need four things.
You need a flash. You need some ambient light. By ambient light, it could
be a constant light, a continuous light,
it could just be natural light, light from a different kind of light
source that is on all the time. The constant bit is
really important here. You need a flash, you need
a constant ambient light. You need a slow shutter speed on your camera and
you need movement. So this movement can
come from you or it can come from your
subject. It doesn't matter. But essentially,
what you're aiming for is kind of a ghost effect. I'll put examples on screen. And how we do this
is quite simple. Using a slow shutter speed allows the ambient light
to come into the image. Using the flash
freezes your subject. So when that movement happens, the ambient light
is going to blur the subject is going to
freeze because of the flash. An example here is of this model that I worked with as
she jumps into frame, she does like a little leap. You can see that she's frozen
at the height of her leap, but the shutter is still
open as she falls down. So you can see
that ghost effect. If I had had the shutter
speed open for longer, that ghost effect would
be even more prominent. This is a really
simple technique, and if you have a flash I would absolutely
recommend trying it out. It's a lot of trial and error as anything movement
orientated is, but it can work for some really effective and stylized results. In the next lesson,
we're going to recap because we've
gotten to the end now of this mini class all about using movement
in photography.
10. 10 Recap: So congratulations, guys. You have made it to the
end of this mini class. All about using motion to
enhance your photography. In this class, we've
explored a lot of the why. Why would you use motion? And the answer could
be to express emotion, to tell a story or to help
create a focal point. Those are just some of
the reasons that we kind of covered
within this class. And we also exploed the how. How do we capture
motion blur? How freeze motion and how
do we combine the two. But now that we've gone
through all these options, this is a great time for you
to decide which two ways of showing motion
within photography you want to do for
your class project. For example, you
might want to freeze motion and also
have motion blur. You might want to use
motion to tell a story, as well as another photo where you're using motion
to advertise a product. Take a moment to think about
which techniques and which reasonings resonate with you most and when you have
finished taking the photos, remember to upload them to the class project
gallery so that I can take a look at what you've created
throughout this class. But thank you guys for watching and I will see you in the next.
Sophia Carey, Photographer
