Pixiq

One of the most thrilling sights I’ve seen in nature is a cheetah running at top speed.  It’s truly breathtaking.  There are basically two approaches you can use to capture this fleeting event, and I thought about this for years before I actually had the chance to shoot this. I could use a relatively slow shutter speed (such as 1/30^th or 1/60^th) to blur the action to a certain degree, and this will produce an artistic image that will imply motion.  Or I could use a very fast shutter speed to reveal every muscle and hair on the cat with tack sharp clarity.  This will result in a very different image that also will be quite impressive.  This is what I wanted to do.

 The problem, though, is this:  If a fast shutter is used, the background will also be sharp.  Panning at high speed to keep up with the cheetah wouldn't help -- the shutter speed of 1/1600^th of a second (which is what I used for this image) would still render the background elements with no blur at all. I didn't want that. Instead, I wanted to visually isolate the cheetah from the background and make it stand out prominently.  Therefore, my goal was to juxtapose the sharp cat against a streaked background.

In order to achieve that, I opened the sharp image in Photoshop and selected the background with the lasso tool.  I feathered the edge of the selection with 4 pixels, and then I chose the pull down menu command:  Filter > blur > motion blur.  In the dialog box, I made the streaks of color horizontal and defined the number of pixels to give the background enough blur to look as if the shutter had been fairly slow.

I used a 300mm f/2.8 telephoto, and the camera selected the lens aperture– f/4 – because I used shutter priority.