Shutter drag means that you have your shutter open for longer than the "correct" amount of time. This allows you to blur motion or other parts of your scene. It's used a lot in sport photography while panning with a subject to create a illusion of speed and motion. What I wanted to do with it tonight was just make a really odd image that would make people think a bit to figure it out.
I knew I wanted to use a fisheye to expand space, but I wasn't sure how I was going to use shutter drag. I played around with moving the camera in various ways in relation to myself, this got me a lot of different blur/frozen subject combinations. I eventually went with holding the camera directly above my head and spinning around. I would remain fairly stationary in relation to the camera, but the background would get really blurred. I used a shutter speed of 1 second with an aperture of f5.6. This gave a nice long time to blur while still not over exposing the image.
I tried this a few times, and it's basically impossible to keep the camera exactly in the same spot overhead. My face just wasn't staying sharp enough, so I added in a flash to freeze my face. At first I used a soft box, but that lit up and froze the rest of the room too which was not to my liking. I switched to a 1/8 grid to focus the light only on my face. At 1/128 power, this gave me just enough freeze to make my face fairly sharp, while not making it look completely unnaturally lit. I had a lamp on in the corner of the room, so that cast a nice warm tone and provided both fill and a rim light for me.
In Lr, I just applied the Cross Process 2 filter and was done with it. There's not much to do with a photo like this unless you want to put a lot of work into it.
So lets talk about shutter speeds a bit more. First off, every shutter speed, no matter how fast it is, is going to have some motion blur. Whether or not you can see that motion blur to the point where it's distracting is what dictates if you've "frozen" the action or not. Sometimes, the motion blur will be smaller than a pixel, so technically it's nonexistent. But remember that no matter how short a shutter you're using, its still an amount of time for the world around the camera to move. So while you may freeze a sitting person at 1/500 of a second no problem, catching a F.1 car in profile at 200mph is going to have a heck of a lot of motion blur. Freezing action is completely subjective to a couple of factors. How fast is your subject moving in relation to you? What light source is lighting your subject, is it a strobe or a continuous light? What is your shutter speed? With these three questions, you can pretty much calculate how fast of a shutter you need to get the amount of blur you want.
For example, if I'm shooting in daylight and a F.1 car going 200 mph coming right towards me I can probably get away with using 1/500 of a second to freeze the car. Even though the car is moving really fast, since it's coming right toward me it's not moving that fast in relation to me. If it was moving in profile to me, that is perpendicularly, then I'd need 1/1000 or even 1/2000 of a second to catch it. However, if the car was being lit by a strobe that had a t.1 time of 1/1000 of a second (not likely) then I could use any shutter speed I want because the car is being frozen by the light and not the camera.
So applying all this to the picture for today, I knew that if I held the camera above my head and spun with it, I would barely be moving in relation to the camera. That way, I could use a shutter of 1 second to blur the background, which would be moving really fast in relation to the camera. To further freeze my face, used light from a strobe. A strobe only illuminates the subject for a very short time, so you are basically making a shutter out of light. Since it is more powerful than the ambient exposure of my face, my artificially light face will take precedence in the image and will be seen over the ambient exposure.
That's all for today, see you tomorrow.
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