From the course: Mobile Photography Weekly

Unique uses for motion blur - iPhone Tutorial

From the course: Mobile Photography Weekly

Unique uses for motion blur

- Hey everybody, Sean Duggan here and, you know, one of the things I really love to experiment with, in terms of my mobile photography, actually, all photography, but particularly mobile photography, since the camera is with me all the time, is motion blur and using longer exposures to capture interesting aspects of motion. So, a lot of times you see this done with moving water, whether it's ocean waves or rivers. We did a previous episode of Mobile Photography Weekly of slowing the motion of a river, but since I'm here in this cool house with a pool table, I immediately thought, oh we gotta try out motion blur and light trail photography using the pool table. So, there are a lot of different apps that are available for both Android and iOS, that offer long exposure and motion blur capability. Slow Shutter Cam is one for iOS, Lightroom CC for mobile app on iOS has a long exposure feature, and there are a lot of different apps that offer this capability. I'm gonna be using an app that is actually designed for night photography on iOS, it's called NightCap Pro. I've already got it cued up here, so let's go and set it up. So the cool thing about NightCap Pro, obviously it's for night photography, but it has a mode for light trails. So I'm gonna tap on this little star down here and again, I got modes for long exposure, star trails, international space station mode, I don't think the space station is gonna make an appearance here. We're gonna be using this light trails mode there, so it's already set up there. We're just gonna tap there to set my exposure and darken it down a little bit there. Alright, that looks good and the way this works is you start the shutter button, you tap the button to start the exposure and then you tap the button again to end it and you'll be able to see the blur build up in real time. Alright, so, are we ready, Jacob? - I'm ready Sean. - Alright, go ahead whenever you're ready. - One, two, three. (pool balls clacking) - Woo cool! I like it, it actually looks like fireworks, almost. Let's take a look at that. Yeah, that's nice. And, you know, depending on how long you leave the exposure going, you can get different trails. I left that going a bit long so you can see it build up there, but here's some other iterations that I've done here. The main point about doing light trail and motion photography like this, is to kinda try to think outside the box. Think beyond the obvious subjects like waves and rivers and waterfalls, things like that. What else can you shoot, maybe it's pool tables. Maybe there's a couple dancing on a dance floor. Or carnival rides at the county fair. There are so many subjects you can shoot with the light trail mode to get really interesting results and of course, if you want to have the static elements of the scene be in focus, you do want to have the camera on a tripod when you are doing this, but it's a fun way to explore an aspect of photography that you cannot really see with your eyes and that only the magic of photography can reveal to you.

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