You have got to be kidding me?

You have got to be kidding me?

Someone showed me a link this week to a program called Piccure designed to remove camera shake and motion blur from photographs. If this was an iPhone app, aimed at cleaning up those shaky images shot in nightclubs it’d be brilliant. Phone cameras just can’t deal with low light situations. But it’s not. This is a plug in for Photoshop Elements and Lightroom. It’s marketed at people with enough interest in photography to have bought an image editing package.

I quote from the website:

“Correct camera shake in a matter of seconds – save time, money and frustration.”

Seriously? I think this is just encouraging people to not learn the basics, to just spend more money on a plugin that will attempt to fix it after the fact in Photoshop. If you really want to “save time, money and frustration” just get to know your camera and learn the exposure triangle.

Dig a little deeper on the site and you get to this:

“For example, if you shoot a subject that is far away with a tele lens and you select a long exposure (e.g. 1/50), your image may be blurry because your camera has moved a little during the 1/50 seconds.”

It’s blurry because hand holding a long lens steady at 1/50th isn’t possible, even if you’re Joe McNally, but you do not need to buy Photoshop plugins. You can fix this easily by opening your aperture and/or upping your ISO.

This is clever technology but you really don’t need to spend £80 on it. Instead invest a little time in learning. There are plenty of free resources online, in fact you can even find a few tips on getting sharper shots right here.

So please, save your money and educate yourself instead with a few ebooks from Craft & Vision instead.

Photo Of The Week – Bearing Down

Photo Of The Week – Bearing Down

For this weeks photo of the week I’ve gone back a few years to pull this from my archive.

Audi TT 3.2

It might look like a long exposure rig shot but this is actually my first ever car-to-car shot. In principle it’s simple – you drive the camera car at the same speed as the subject car, pick a fairly low shutter speed and fire away. Actually doing it is a bit harder!

EXIFFor this shot, I stopped down to f/20 which gave me a shutter speed of 1/5 of a second. I had some ND filters in the bag, but going any slower than this didn’t end well. Keeping the cars moving at the same speed (about 20mph in this case) isn’t too tricky, but with everything moving in three dimensions any bumps, turns or gradients in the road make the cars move relative to each other and cause too much motion blur.

The camera for this shot was mounted on a tripod with its legs open wide and wedged into the back of a Smart car. I was actually driving the TT with a wireless shutter release in the hand you can’t see on the wheel. We drove along the lane 4 times, totaling about 10 minutes, shooting 2 or 3 frames a second and this image was one of only 4 sharp ones.