Blur — Progressive Street

**Saul Leiter 'Snow' (1960) © Saul Leiter Foundation, Howard Greenberg Gallery**

“I often think that the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day.” Van Gogh

“Memory blurs, that's the point. If memory didn't blur you wouldn't have the fool's courage to do things again, again, again, that tear you apart.” Joyce Carol Oates

“If you look carefully at life, you see blur. Shake your hand. Blur is part of life” William Klein

BLUR, MOTION BLUR!!!

Motion is hard you need to have a camera in S or M mode and setting the shutter to slower speeds, the shutter of your camera needs to be long opened enough to allow your camera’s image sensor to ‘see’ the movement of your subject, but:

– If your shutter speed is too long, you lose too much detail in the shot.

– If your shutter speed is too short, you don't capture the sense of motion.

There are 3 ways to get a feeling of movement in your images:

– have your subject move

– have your camera move (or both)

– or using Slow Sync Flash

*Flow-Like-the-Wind by TOKYO COUNTRY BOY*

http://www.theinspiredeye.net/flash-street-photography/

For capturing movement in an image you need to select a longer shutter speed, but of course also the speed of your subject and how much light there is in the scene come into play.

The key is to experiment

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MOTION BLURRY SUBJECT

WITH FOCUSED BACKGROUND

MOTION BLURRY BACKGROUND

WITH FOCUSED SUBJECT (PANNING)

Motion Blur with Rear Curtain sync Flash

“If you look carefully at life, you see blur. Shake your hand. Blur is part of life“

William Klein

I photograph what I see in front of me, I move in close to see better and use a wide-angle lens to get as much as possible in the frame.' 'William Klein, Close Up '

*New York, 1955 - with a wide-angle lens*

Klein preferred using a wide-angle lens (21mm-28mm) compared to something more standard like Henri Cartier-Bresson's 50mm: 'Does it really bother you? In any case, I'm not deliberately distorting. I need the wide angle to get a lot of things into the frame. Take the picture of may day in Moscow.
With a 50mm jammed between the parade and the side-walk, I would have been able to frame only the old lady in the middle.
But what I wanted was the whole group, the tartars, the Armenians, Ukrainians, Russians,
an image of empire surrounding one old lady on a sidewalk as a parade goes by.' 'In photography, I was interested in letting the machine loose, in taking risks, exploring the possibilities of film, paper, printing in different ways, playing with exposures, composition and accidents. It’s all part of what an image can be, which is anything. Good pictures, bad pictures - why not?' In the '50s, Klein had to fight against many "taboos" shooting in the streets: grain, high-contrast, blur, resolution, and accidents. He used these taboos to create his language, his "techniques", full of energy and rebellion.

In a 1981 interview: 'In the 1950s I couldn't find an American publisher for my New York pictures [...] Everyone I showed them to said, 'Ech! This isn't New York, too ugly, too seedy and too one-sided. They said 'This isn't photography, this is sh*t!'

I came from the outside, the rules of photography didn't interest me... there were things you could do with a camera that you couldn't do with any other medium... grain, contrast, blur, cock-eyed framing, eliminating or exaggerating grey tones and so on. I thought it would be good to show what's possible, to say that this is as valid of a way of using the camera as conventional approaches. - William Klein