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Over the weekend, I visited the Trumbull County Fair in NE Ohio. While I was there, I had the opportunity to shoot a horse show. I decided that I wanted to capture the motion of the horses and riders and give the sense of movement in my photos. So how did I do it? Well, I’ll explain.
First, the camera and lens settings are key, so I’ll start there:
I shot most of the horse show with the Canon EF 70-200mm, f/2.8L IS lens. This is a fantastic lens! You certainly don’t need a high-end lens to capture shots like this but it does have features that help. What is that feature? It’s image stabilization, of course!
On the 70-200mm lens, there are two IS modes, creatively named 1 and 2. Mode 1 is for your normal image stabilization. It will help stabilize the lens and minimize camera shake at slow shutter speeds. Mode 2, on the other hand, helps to keep the lens stable when you’re panning, that is, shooting and moving the lens from side-to-side. There was plenty of panning given that the horses are moving horizontally in front of me.
As many of you know, I have been shooting with the Canon 5D Mark II. However, every one of the features and settings I’ll talk about are available on most other Canon and Nikon cameras.
I love shooting in RAW. It gives me much greater flexibility when editing the photos later. However, in situations where I will be shooting a lot of photos very quickly, I absolutely need to shoot JPEG. When I’m shooting RAW, I can only shoot up to 13 or so before the camera needs to stop and write the files to the CF card. On top of that, RAW files are HUGE so writing them to the CF card will take much longer. In a situation where you’re capturing movement, you’re likely going to be shooting more than 13. When I shoot JPEG, I can fire off over 50 photos before the camera needs a break.
Because I don’t have time to refocus before every shot, I use the camera’s auto-focus mode. And, to make sure that the camera focuses on the right subject every time, I specifically set the center auto-focus point. That way I know that no matter what the camera is seeing, it will focus on whatever is on the center focus point. Otherwise, the camera might randomly focus on something else and I’ve just lost a whole string of shots.
This is also the only time I generally take the AF mode off of one shot focus. In one-shot focus, the camera focuses before the first shot and maintains that focus until you stop shooting and recompose. Well that doesn’t work here. I’m going to be taking multiple shots of a moving object and the focus might need to change from shot to shot. So how do I do that? I set the camera to AI Servo focus mode, also known as Continuous Focus on Nikon cameras. This forces the camera to stay focused on a moving object. Basically, the camera refocuses a split second before every shot even if you never take your finger off the shutter release. This is key when shooting a moving object. Without AI Servo, you would end up with a focused first shot (maybe not if the subject is moving very quickly) and a bunch of unfocused shots.
My light metering decisions are specific to this particular scenario and may not apply to yours. I’ll explain why.
When I was shooting, I realized that I was shooting many horses that were different colors. Some were mostly white while others were mostly dark. In addition, most of the background was lighter than the horse and I had the sun at my back. If I would have used normal evaluative metering, some of my shots might have been fine. But if a black (or dark) horse came up, I might lose detail in the horse itself and have a perfectly exposed background. Not exactly what I’m looking for. So I set the camera to spot metering. Spot metering reads the light in the small circle in the center of the frame and meters off of that. Do I risk blowing out the background? Sure. But I’d rather do that and preserve detail in the horse than end up with a nice background and an underexposed subject.
Generally, I shoot in Av (Aperture Priority) mode. I choose Av because it allows me to control the depth-of-field (DOF, i.e., or how much of the subject is in focus). In normal shots, I generally don’t care what the shutter speed is. I pick an aperture that gives me the right DOF and I take the shot. Whether the shutter moves at 1/100 or 1/1600 doesn’t matter. Unless, you’re shooting something that’s moving. If the shutter’s too slow, you’ll end up with nothing but blur. If the shutter’s too fast, you’ll freeze everything. I’d rather err on the side of freezing the movement than blurring all of it but what I really want is to find that sweet spot somewhere in between. So, I’d recommend shooting in Av, but keep an eye on your shutter speed. I’ll explain soon.
There really isn’t too much I can say about setting your ISO. The ISO is a measure of how sensitive your camera’s sensor is to light. When you shoot with a higher ISO, your shutter speed will be faster. When you lower the ISO, the shutter will be slower. More than likely, you’ll be bumping the ISO up a bit, depending on your light but you’ll end up using your ISO to manipulate your shutter speed. The bottom line is you want to find that “sweet spot”. Read on…
There is no science to making sure you capture the movement perfectly each time. Each subject will move a little slower or faster than the next. Even in this case, I ended up changing shutter speed, aperture, and ISO from one horse to the next. What you’re looking for is the sweet spot for the movement you’re photographing.
When you’re shooting something that’s moving you are actually shooting at least two things that are moving. In the photo above, we see that the horse is moving of course. But what else is moving? According to the camera, the background is also moving but at a different speed. While I’m shooting, I am moving the camera and lens to stay centered on the moving object. As far as the camera can tell, the background is moving and so is the subject. So where’s that sweet spot? The sweet spot exists when your shutter is moving fast enough to freeze most of your moving subject (in this case, the horse) but slow enough to blur the moving background. Make sense?
In the photo above, I shot at ISO1250 with an aperture of f/7.1 (so the whole horse and rider would be in focus) and a shutter speed of 1/100. As you can see from the photo, the body of the horse and rider are (mostly) frozen and sharp in the frame but the background and the horse’s hooves are blurred. The rider and horse body were moving slower than 1/100 of a second (relative to the camera) but I was moving the camera past the stationary background faster than 1/100 of a second.
I hope that helps to explain how to capture motion in your camera. Give it a shot! Right outside your door, you can probably find a moving car, right? Set up your camera and start snapping away!
Shawn Duffy is a freelance commercial photographer and photojournalist based in the Washington, DC Metro area. Originally from Pittsburgh, PA, he is a self-taught photographer who has decided to merge his passion for photography with his intense interest in the world around him. From the bustling streets of Bangalore, India, to the refugee camps of occupied Palestine, Shawn strives to create images and tell stories that compel others to act.
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All content © 2010 by Shawn Duffy Photography
How do you like AF speed on Canon EOS 5DMkII ?
Lot of people seem to be complaining about it in comparison to other Canon cameras (like 7D for instance). I am curious about it, because if you tracking a bird in flight or racing car that is coming directly towards you, your requirements are quite bit different from situations, where you are trying to track horse that is running from left to right or person on kayak (even if he is in whitewater rapids) and I’ve not yet seen good reports on what autofocus on 5D MkII can and can not do.
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shawn Reply:
March 26th, 2010 at 11:04
Hi Juha,
I actually have no complaints. Granted, I don’t shoot a lot of action and sports and I haven’t extensively tested other models but I can’t recall any problems with the 5D Mark II. I’d like to play around with the 7D a bit and, once I do, the difference might be noticeable. But, as of right now, I love the camera… haven’t had a single issue.
Thanks!
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