December Photo Challenge

Capturing movement in the landscape

Hello and welcome to December’s challenge.

Each month I will be sharing a new post with a different theme and a challenge for you to go out and complete, should you wish to do so. The idea is to share some of your favourite images from the challenge on the chat page of my substack. Please feel free to post your images and comment on others so that we can build a supportive community around our shared love of photography.

This month the theme is capturing movement in the landscape.

Motion is all around us where ever we choose to shoot. Much of the time in photography we choose to eliminate this from our scenes by selecting a fast enough shutter speed to cancel out any motion blur. We might want to freeze a moving person, or a bird in flight or a wave crashing against a rock and when we do this we eliminate all sense of movement from our images. If we were to photograph a reed stem we would probably elect to do it on a calm day choosing a fast enough shutter speed to freeze any motion that there might be rendering the reed perfectly sharp. But what would happen if we embraced that motion? We might get a really abstract image but would it add something more interesting to the shot?

In the photograph above I have embraced the motion of the reeds and used a slow shutter speed to accentuate their movement. Looking at the foreground of the image I can feel the wind blowing through the reeds and I can see all the texture it creates. To me this is an infinitely more interesting image than a still version of the same scene.

There is a big difference in photographing motion and actually conveying a sense of motion in a scene and we will look at both these aspects of motion in this month’s post.