I’ve had my new camera for eight months now. It is orders of magnitude more capable than the old one, but one of the things the old point-n-shoot had going for it was…. I could trick it easily! A lot of my creative images came from me trying to do something the old girl just wasn’t designed to do. So I’d get something that looked different, unique, unusual. All good things when you’re trying to be creative.

The new camera is just a bit too smart…. It’s hard to find things it CAN’T do! It’s caused me to rethink how I add creativity to a shot. But finally, after more than half a year, I’ve gotten used to the new hotness enough that I’m experimenting more with things that aren’t just straight shots, or post-processed.

One technique that I kept meaning to explore was zoom blur. Basically you take a typical zoom lens (in my case an 18-55mm) and zoom in all the way, focus (I set it to manual) and get the shutter speed down around 1/10-1/20th of a second. Then, crank the zoom to full wide-angle and press the shutter at the same time. Seems to be a little more regular if the camera is on a tripod, and I found turning ON the shake reduction helped (usually you turn it off when on the tripod). It can take a few shots to get a usable image, but the results can be interesting.

joggers zoom blurred

My first experiments were out the window of a hotel I was staying in. There was an empty lot below with a well-trod path cutting through it. A couple of joggers accomodated me by running along it, so I tried it out on them. A bit jiggly, but interesting (this was without tripod).

I thought it interesting enough that once back home I put the gear on a tripod and went outside to the front garden. I focused on a bright red flower with dark greens and bright sun around it. I had to add a polarising filter just to bring the levels down a bit, but got my shutter to 1/20th and aperture to f/8. A few cranks of the zoom later I got a floral firework. Note because you HAVE to center on the point you want the zoom to radiate from, I ended up cropping these shots to put the radial lines off-center.

flower fireworks

Although the ‘raw’ blur shot was nice, to give the final a bit more definition, I also took a straight shot from the same position. Masking out everything but the flower in that shot I merged it into the blur shot, just to give the flower a little sharp definition.