Motion Blur

I am a sucker for motion blur, the thing I like about it is that it is a purely photographic phenomenon that does not exist in real life. You cannot see motion blur, we have expressions like 'it went by so fast it was just a blur' but I wonder whether such expressions came into use before or after the invention of photography. Anyway, nothing conveys the feeling of speed and excitement like motion blur. You can try and fake it in photoshop but it's hard to make it look really convincing.

What you need to do is take a lot of pictures at different shutter speeds, which is now relatively painless with digital cameras as you can easily delete the failures. Set the camera to shutter priority and choose a very slow speed, this one was taken at 1/5 sec. Then pan with your subject to try and get the main subject as sharp as possible (but not necessarily too sharp) and the background will appear as streaks of light. The funfair is a great place for this type of photo with the bright colored lights.

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