Learning from my mistakes

[Salewis555]

Good Morning everyone,

So I am very new to photography and I just bought the Cannon 80D with the 18-135 USM. I have been doing so much research and watching so many videos about photography and learned so much so far. Mainly with this camera I am going to be taking family pictures, just of the things we do. I finally took the camera out for the first time yesterday when we went to the pumpkin patch and I had a few questions about why my pictures came out the way they did. Most of them came out good and a few great buy some have small blurs in them like the one below. I got a majority in focus but the hay in her hands is blurry. I was shooting in Av mode. Tv 1/40, Av 5.0, ISO 400, 29.0MM. In order to get rid of the blur, should I have set the ISO higher, so the shutter speed would have been quicker? If not what was wrong with my setting, when the picture was taken? We were in a barn and the lighting was not the greatest but it was still good.

 

[chuasam]

What's wrong with the hay in motion having some blur?

 

[jcdeboever]

Faster shutter speed would have frozen the the movement of the hay. If the light wasn't that good, then yes, increasing ISO would enable faster shutter speed. Typically you would want 800 + shutter speed to stop motion. Keep in mind you will want to experiment with your ISO speeds to find out the max speed for an exceptable image in relation to noise. Also, an off camera flash bracket and a speedlight can help freeze motion as well. When the speedlight is off camera, it helps prevent shadows behind the subject.

 

[Designer]

I see nothing wrong with showing blur when something is moving. At least you got the model not blurry. Speaking of the model, if you had gotten closer and lower, and used a tiny bit of flash for fill, it would have been better. The flash would also have stopped the blur as well.

 

[Salewis555]

Speaking of the model, if you had gotten closer and lower, and used a tiny bit of flash for fill, it would have been better. The flash would also have stopped the blur as well.

Also, an off camera flash bracket and a speedlight can help freeze motion as well. When the speedlight is off camera, it helps prevent shadows behind the subject.

So if I kept all the setting the same on the camera as they were when I shot this photo, and reshot the same exact photo with a speed light. How does that freeze the image and not cause blur? I understand speeding up shutter speed, but how does more light help freeze a motion?

 

[jcdeboever]

Speaking of the model, if you had gotten closer and lower, and used a tiny bit of flash for fill, it would have been better. The flash would also have stopped the blur as well.

Also, an off camera flash bracket and a speedlight can help freeze motion as well. When the speedlight is off camera, it helps prevent shadows behind the subject.

So if I kept all the setting the same on the camera as they were when I shot this photo, and reshot the same exact photo with a speed light. How does that freeze the image and not cause blur? I understand speeding up shutter speed, but how does more light help freeze a motion?

There is various info on the web. It doesn't always work in all situations. But in your situation you may have been able to bump up the shutter speed to at or below flash sync speed, while maintaining a lower ISO. If you can revisit the place, it may prove beneficial to experiment between that and finding the acceptable level of ISO to noise. I have found that if the subject is not heavily back lit, the flash helps. I discovered this at grandson's basketball games under poor lighting conditions. Again, I found that anything over ISO 1600 was not acceptable for me and the camera/lens (2.8) I was using at the time.

 

[john.margetts]

So if I kept all the setting the same on the camera as they were when I shot this photo, and reshot the same exact photo with a speed light. How does that freeze the image and not cause blur? I understand speeding up shutter speed, but how does more light help freeze a motion?

Flash freezes motion because the burst of light is faster than 1/1000 seconds. It is not the more light, it is the very short time the light is there for.

 

[photo1x1.com]

So if I kept all the setting the same on the camera as they were when I shot this photo, and reshot the same exact photo with a speed light. How does that freeze the image and not cause blur? I understand speeding up shutter speed, but how does more light help freeze a motion?

Flash freezes motion because the burst of light is faster than 1/1000 seconds. It is not the more light, it is the very short time the light is there for.

If I may give my 2c:
That is partly correct. Flash will freeze a moving object because of the short flash duration. But only in a very dark setting, like for example in a studio environment. If there is quite some light in the setting, like in the shot above, there will be a certain amount of blur, plus a sharp image (both in the same shot), sometimes resulting in a rather strange look (similar to these examples here: How to use rear curtain flash for creative photos :: Digital Photo Secrets). Sometimes this look is desired, but more often it is not. You sure can light the entire scene with flash here, but that would require more than one flash, and is something for a rather experienced photographer.

For your shot I would agree with what most said - there is nothing wrong with a little motion blur - it gives your images a nice touch and shows the action.
However - usually your kids will move around, and not only the straw, so you really need to freeze all motion in order to get acceptable images. Depending on how much of the frame of your image is taken up by the moving kid, you need faster, or slower shutter speed.
For example: in a full body portrait of your kid, it will fill the complete frame. If it raises its hand, you will have motion blur even at faster shutter speeds like 1/200th or even 1/500th. But if your kid is in a distance and is only very small in the frame, 1/100th is probably enough.

And for your question: yes, ramping up the ISO would give you faster shutter speeds - but opening up your aperture (lower Av number) would have done so too. In order to get the fastes shutter speed possible, ramp up the ISO to the highest number you can live with (like others said, make some test shots and see how much noise, produced by high ISO is OK for you) AND lower the aperture number to the lowest possible.

 

[The_Traveler]

Disregarding the lighting stuff, two other things:

Posting such a small image means that viewers can't see details well. try for a max of 1200 wide and 900 high

Also, I think you're missing a bet byt lighting the background. Hay is hay, IMO what's lovely here is the little girl and the light between the hay bales.

 

[Frank F.]

I love the idea to concentrate on the skin tones and have the light coming up to overexposure from the three holes. Which puts the question in my mind: Where does the main diffuse light come from? You have a lighting setup drawing for us? I like the brighter version in the OP.

 

[dennybeall]

I would have moved in closer, got down lower, raised the shutter speed, kept the ISO the same and used the flash to illuminate the subject and left the background lit enough to set the scene.
So many different ways, all can be right, to shoot the same scene.

 

[beagle100]

I would have moved in closer, got down lower, raised the shutter speed, kept the ISO the same and used the flash to illuminate the subject and left the background lit enough to set the scene.
So many different ways, all can be right, to shoot the same scene.

^^ also would be my approach

 

[Derrel]

Good Morning everyone,

So I am very new to photography and I just bought the Cannon 80D with the 18-135 USM. I have been doing so much research and watching so many videos about photography and learned so much so far. Mainly with this camera I am going to be taking family pictures, just of the things we do. I finally took the camera out for the first time yesterday when we went to the pumpkin patch and I had a few questions about why my pictures came out the way they did. Most of them came out good and a few great buy some have small blurs in them like the one below. I got a majority in focus but the hay in her hands is blurry. I was shooting in Av mode. Tv 1/40, Av 5.0, ISO 400, 29.0MM. In order to get rid of the blur, should I have set the ISO higher, so the shutter speed would have been quicker? If not what was wrong with my setting, when the picture was taken? We were in a barn and the lighting was not the greatest but it was still good.

An almost PERFECT balance of ambient light to flash...the blurring is from the ambient light and the 1/40 second shutter duration...the flash pop filled in the dimmer foreground...the metering matrix ignored the blown-out outdoor light and left hot highlight areas (which do not detract one whit IMO). At ISO 400 at 1/40 second and f/5.0 aperture, a good part of the exposure is from ambient light, and that reveals the dropping straw as being in motion; the flash is acting as a fill-in light, and providing a well-exposed image which could be darkened in post-processing if so desired. In this specific case, the blur ADDS to the overall photo; if her hands or face or limbs had been blurred, then the resulting shots would likely be deemed failures, but I think this is a smashing success.

But, to answer the question as to how to stop the blurring, yes, a shorter shutter duration, like say 1/160 to 1/250 second, would be a good start (I don't think the 80D will synch regular single-pop flash at 1/250?). Slow speeds like 1/15 to 1/50 second almost always will show 'some' blurring on rather normal human activities; overall, the f/5.0 aperture, 29mm focal length, and the camera-to-subject distance keeps the magnification low, and the depth of field deep, so the entire scene has good focus--and also, this would be considered to be a very good exposure of ambient + balanced fill flash. If you want to avoid blurring in a **balanced** ambient-to-flash shot like this, setting the shutter to the fastest allowable speed for your camera would be a good start.

This is not an all-flash or flash-as-main-light-source photo; this is a shot with both ambient light AND flash output, both in concert, making the exposure--that's why the overall scene is so light and airy, and why there is no strong, black shadow behind her from the flash's output. If you had shot this at ISO 100, f/16, and with the flash, it would look very different, and the flash, alone, would have made up 90 percent of the exposure, the hay would have been frozen by a flash burst of perhaps 1/1500 second in duration, and the effect would feel more like a little girl on a light, flash-lit hay pile, with much darker straw bales behind her.