Shutter drag

OK. Here's one example of this shutter drag technique I was talking about in class. This one was shot just after sundown using a 28 mm focal length with an aperture of f/4 at 1/10th of a second shutter speed using the TTL flash built into the camera.

This one worked out fairly well because there's not too much blur in the subject's face, but the edges of her hair and body along with the background get a nice little hint of movement.

One of the tricks to really making this work is to have most of the ambient illumination behind the subjet and have very little available light on your primary subject. In this situation, there was very daylight on Cynthia's face, but the wall sconces on the party house back there provided enough light for the blur to happen. You can see some blue sky in the background, but because we were standing in a slightly shaded area, there was not too much light where we were standing.

One of the tricks to this technique is to find the correct exposure for the available light for a slow shutter speed--something like 1/15th or 1/8th and then underexpose about one stop add then add the flash.

You rarely get the same results every time with this technique. There are so many variables to consider that it's just hard to predict the results, but with a little experience and some practice, you can get some fun pictures every now and then...plus a whole bunch of mistakes too.