Help with motion blur

[HHRC]

Ive been trying to do some action shots of the dog recently but cant seem to stay in focus. The picture below was taken yesterday, the camera was on a tripod and i moved the camera with the movement of the dog, but as you can see the image is still not sharply focused.

Can anybody give any advice on how to take these shots better?

[Chris Hawkins]

What camera are you using? A good DSLR will have predictive continuous focus. If not then you will need to manually focus on a predefined spot and snap when the hound passes it. You will still need a pretty high shutter speed to stop the action. You can get this by upping the ISO. It's also good to have a smaller aperture to increase the DoF, but this is at the expense of shutter speed! Hope that helps.

The attached was 1/1600s at f2.8, ISO200 - you can see the Dof is very narrow. Note: I took 98 photos to get this one - so patience is the other thing to try :-)

[HHRC]

Thanks for the advice.

The camera is a Konica Minolta Z3 so pretty basic.
I had it set at f 2.8, ISO 100 and shutter speed 1/1000 (which is its highest)

It was set to continous burst but not sure it has predictive focus?

[StuG]

I'm assuming the Z3 is pretty similar to my old Dimage 7i a trick I was told on that was to press the shutter a 1/2 sec to a sec before I actually wanted to take the pic as the actual shutter mechanism was a bit slow.
You will need to set to manual focus first of course.

[StagePhotography.co.uk]

How I do it is pre-focus on a *piece of ground* between me and the dog, then half press the shutter button... move the camera up to the dog keepign the shutter half pressed..

Then call the dog...

When the dog gets to the piece of ground, fully depress the button..


If the camera is a bit laggy in response then try and get
the dog to run along the front of you, left to right
and not at you... (helps if you got someone else there
to throw sticks etc)...

Then you can focus on him as he runs, but also TRACK
with him along his path... So you get the blur of the ground
but he should stay in focus..

[Earl53]

Or you could fool it and add motion blur in Photoshop.

[england1965]

Remember - if you are going to try and freeze the action without panning - you need to keep everything in the DOF sharp. You can see in Chris's (very nice) shot - that the grass is sharp - as you would expect.

If you are panning with the subject then everything bar the subject should be blurred.

Cheers

Mark