ONLINE: Depicting Motion
press release: PhotoMidwest Third Thursday presentations are free and open to the public. They are held online at 7:00pm CDT on the third Thursday of each month, on Zoom. Click here to join.
Along with contrast and color, motion is one of the most salient features of a visual scene, but unlike the first two features, motion (change of position as a function of time) is difficult to show in a still photograph which captures a single moment in time. As a photographer interested in wildlife, I know that a high percentage of the time it is movement of the subject that first directs my attention to it. Given the importance of motion in vision, it seems important to consider how we might try to depict it in photography.
This presentation will feature examples of images in which motion is an important element. There are three classical ways to convey the sense of motion by manipulating the shutter speed: 1) freezing action using a fast shutter speed of an obviously moving subject, 2) motion blur using a slow shutter speed, and 3) panning of a moving subject to blur the background. With the advent of digital processing we can also portray the movement in a sequence of images on a common background or animate the images in a digital file for a video-like effect.
About Tom Yin: Tom is a retired professor of neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin. He has had a long-standing interest in photography and had a darkroom in his bathroom when he first came to Madison in 1977. For many years afterward, a research and teaching career as well as raising a family took precedence over photography, but his interest in this hobby has been revived in recent years, especially following retirement in 2016.
As a child, Tom grew up in Colorado where he spent many hours in the mountains and developed an interest in photographing nature and wildlife. Many of the images in this presentation were taken from a small island in the northwoods of Wisconsin near Hayward. He joined PhotoMidwest in 2018 and currently serves as the membership chair.
For more information see his website at www.neurotraveler.com