Digital Photography Tips
How to Stop Motion

Here are some digital photography tips to help you stop motion in your photographs. If you've ever tried to take pictures of people moving around quickly and gotten a blurry image instead of freezing the movement in time like you wanted you'll be able to use these tips.

Have you ever tried to take pictures at a sporting event and ended up with blurry pictures like this?

Here's what you need to do to prevent this from happening.

When you're trying to freeze motion shutter speed is the most important part of the equation. The shutter speed you'll need will depend on how quickly the object you're photographing is moving. If you're trying to capture someone who is walking you could set your shutter speed as low as 1/60 of a second. If you want to take a picture of someone moving a bit faster like a bicyclist, you should set it to 1/100th. If you want to take a picture of something much faster like a car you'll need to set your shutter at 1/1000th or even higher.

The next priority you should consider is aperture. Your aperture setting controls how wide open your lens is. The wider open the lens the more light gets in on the camera sensor. Also the wider open the lens the shallower the depth of field.

You also must consider the ISO you set your camera to. A higher ISO will make the sensor more sensitive to light, but it also puts more noise in the photo making it harder to get a clear picture with lots of detail. When setting your ISO try to set your ISO as low as you can while still getting the effect you want.

Freezing motion is harder to do in low light situations, but it can still be done. Depending on the quality of the camera you own you may end up sacrificing image clarity to get the picture. More expensive DSLR cameras have better noise control capabilities than cheaper cameras. If you have a high quality camera you'll be able to crank up your ISO and shutter speed and still get the picture quality you desire.

As usual my advice to you is to get out there and practice. There are opportunities to take pictures everyday. Experiment with your camera settings to get the pictures you want.

If you found these digital photography tips useful check out our other digital photography tutorials.