Reconsidering Motion

In many ways, the visual arts, but especially photography, give us a somewhat skewed version of the world around us. To some degree, both painting and sculpture have somewhat acknowledged just how chaotic the world around us is over the last hundred or so years, but photography has lagged behind as its takeoff point is in the representational painting, illustration, and graphics of the mid/late 19th century. This leaves us with a somewhat distorted sense of both the level of visual organization in the real world, and a preference for a stillness that in fact may not exist in reality. At times this can be akin to the actual natural world as opposed to a diorama in a natural history museum.

The world is chaotic, random and constantly in motion, and historically one of photography's primary goals has been to freeze things in time. Accordingly, I want to use the next couple of blog posts to break out the different types of visual chaos and randomness we as photographers may need to work with, and suggest some visual pathways to working with it, rather than excluding it from our imagery.

For many photographers dealing with motion is either an A/B decision; freezing the motion, or allowing for motion in the photo. However, in many ways this merely scratches the surface. In really active chaotic situations, both the degree and position of motion can vary quite a bit. For example, in the photo that opens this blogpost of an ocean wave and the point of a structure, the two decisions that need to made are pretty simple- motion or frozen motion, compositional relationship of the wave and the architectural element. This sounds far easier than the visual realities you come up against as photographer in this situation though. The motion decision is obvious, but actually having the wave and the point "touch" visually required over fifty exposures, as no two waves come in at the same angle to the point, but also timing the shutter release so the wave is barely interfacing with the concrete point is less than exact science.

The usual outcome in such a situation is that the final edit is made, and most of the other forty nine photos get deleted, as they did not visually succeed, even though the basic composition is the same across all the photos.

However complexities around motion can get far more complicated, and can actually modify how content may be presented in an image. The photo above of a wind farm in the California desert really begins to clarify the complexities that can arise in situations where motion is critical to the image. In a photo like this, whether frozen or in motion, the biggest concern is the blade positioning you desire. Long before you get to the the decision of frozen motion or motion blur, there are the issues of preferred blade position for each windmill, but also if the blades from neighboring windmills will overlap or not. If you were doing this as an image with frozen motion, you can work on tripod, and do differing exposures for each windmill in the diagonal sequence, and assemble the whole photo in post production.

Once actual motion is introduced into the image both blade position and blade width start to come into conflict. At this point, your shooting becomes almost statistical, as there are too many interacting variables operating simultaneously. Motion is not an on/off switch when multiple items are moving in overlapping planes, but rather a chaotic continuum. The longer the exposure, the wider the moving blades appear, and the greater the probability of undesired overlaps occurring. Accordingly, a shoot like this requires multiple exposures across somewhere between three and five shutter speeds. When we actually did this shoot, I time bracketed from 1/20 second down to 1/4 second in clusters of fifty images, and finally decided to use the 1/10 second group because we were able to balance blade width while still controlling for overlaps.

Much like the photo that opens this blogpost though, once the most successful is identified, the rest of the images from get set aside or are deleted. Functionally they become invisible.

Of late though, I have actually been rethinking discarding these "lesser" images, feeling the real story is embedded in seeing all the chaos gridded out in sequence. Initially this idea was one of more scientific fascination, rather than successful visual outcome. I had struggled with this idea in a landscape setting like the sequence of spring runoff in the Kings River above, and while no two photos were exactly the same, you really had to fight your way into the details in the photos to make out that information. Visually, I found this approach to be a dead end.

Over the last few months though, I started to find that the application of this idea in a macrophotography setting, rather than a landscape setting, can yield interesting visual results, where the influence of the wind, or moving water, was immediately apparent in each image. We can see the application of this approach in the desert flower cluster above from this past March at Joshua Tree National Park. By coming in very close to primary subject while in continuous motion, we can now actually view how a small area is never positionally the same in high wind.