In-Camera Special Effects

When I was in photography school, there were many options to creating special effects, such as optical printers. Yet what was most interesting was the ability to create special effects on camera, in a fairly simple fashion.

My professors in photography school explained the many ways to achieve these effects, without having to splurge on a lot of equipment; all you need is a camera. At first I was a bit concerned that I wouldn't get the technique of how to do this, but eventually I got the hang of it. You need to have some patience and be willing to experiment with a film or digital single lens reflex camera.

Say you want to try shooting at different shutter speeds; you want to make sure there is little camera movement as the image may appear blurry, but you can also do it handheld if you want that effect. When you move the camera, you can create an effect called panning where your subject will appear clear and focused, yet the surrounding background will seem blurry. Yet this also depends on how fast your subject is moving, what kind of lens you're using and the speed of the shutter. If you attach the camera to a tripod, you can shoot at a slow shutter speed to capture both moving and still images.

Blurry images and abstractions are more commonplace in modern photography. Sometimes these can come out of failed experiments, which is okay as sometimes the unexpected can work to your benefit. Sometimes it may take more work than you expect to get the desired effect. You can shoot at different shutter speeds and with different lenses to achieve a variety of effects.

Photography schools will usually tell you that shooting images out of focus can create some impressive pictures as well. Sometimes this can be seen as a mistake, but in some cases it's intentionally done to create a sense of disorientation. By experimenting with different lenses and apertures, you can explore then depth of field to alter the image's focus. I tried this in photography school with some success, it takes patience, and especially if you have an SLR camera, you can actually alter the focus for the desired effect.

Another thing I learned in photography school was that minimizing the depth of field can also produce intriguing effects. If you shoot at the widest aperture of the lens and focus on a particular subject, this will create an effect where the subject is in focus and the background is slightly blurry.

If you're going for something a bit more extreme, you can try to create a wide angle image. If you use a wide-angle lens and bring your subject to the foreground, the background will appear much smaller in the end result. This is typical as things that are closer to the camera will have a larger appearance, giving the whole image an exaggerated appearance.

If you're up for these experiments, you can produce some amazing images. And as this type of photography is more widely accepted in photography schools, you then have the free rein to learn all aspects of in camera special effects.