Project Six: The big project - Drive-by shooting

James Paterson shows you how to shoot portraits in a car, safely, with beautiful blurred motion

- James Paterson

The Mission – Learn how to shoot portraits with their surroundings blurred by motion

Time – Two hours

Skill level – Advanced

Kit needed – Suction stand – Portable flash or Speedlight – Car

We’re all used to seeing portraits with lovely background bokeh, but what about a different kind of blur? Motion blur can give your portraits a dynamic sense of speed and blur the surroundings into gorgeous silky streaks.

In this project we’ll look at how it’s done. First we’ll explain how to shoot subjects in moving cars to capture both stunning blurred trails of light and a sharp subject in a single frame, then we’ll explore a few other methods for shooting beautiful motion-blurred backgrounds.

This can be something of a balancing act in terms of our camera settings. We need to slow our shutter speed down to a length that will allow for the moving parts of the scene to become blurred, while at the same time keeping it fast enough to capture the person sharply.

We humans can never be entirely still – even when trying very hard not to move – so this can be a limiting factor in our exposure. One way to get around the problem is to shoot in the dark, like our car image here, then use a flash to pick out and freeze the subject in question. This way, the flash duration effectively becomes our shutter speed for the dark parts of the scene.

In a sense we’re making two exposures in a single frame – one ambient exposure for the surrounding lights and the other for the flash. A four-second exposure blurs the surroundings into these stunning light trails, while the pop of flash in the dark car freezes the motion for a sharp subject.